Episode 141: The Great Vowel Shift (Part 1)

Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is episode 141, The Great Vowel Shift, Part 1.

In this episode, we're going to delve into the Great Vowel Shift by looking at a series of changes that affected certain vowel sounds pronounced in the front part of the mouth.

We're going to focus on the two highest front vowels, and we'll explore how the sound of those vowels evolved in the Middle English period.

Those were some of the earliest developments in the major event that's known today as the Great Vowel Shift.

Over the next couple of episodes, we'll continue our look at changes that took place in other parts of the mouth.

Collectively, these changes will help to mark the transition from Middle English to Modern English.

So over the course of these episodes, we'll break down the Great Vowel Shift piece by piece, and we'll see how those changes shape the language we speak today.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com, and you can sign up to support the podcast and get bonus episodes and transcripts at patreon.com/slash historyofenglish.

Now before we begin, let me make a quick programming note.

Last time, I mentioned that I was going to discuss the great vowel shift over the course of two episodes, one focusing on the front vowels and one focusing on the back vowels.

Well as I started to delve into this episode I realized that I couldn't really cover the front vowel changes in one episode.

There's an extra vowel sound in the front of the mouth and the changes there were a bit more complicated.

So I've decided to break the discussion of the great vowel shift into three parts.

In this episode, we'll focus on the two highest front vowels.

Next time, we'll look at the lower front vowels and what happened to them.

And then in the third episode, we'll explore the changes to the back vowels.

I don't usually divide a topic into multiple parts like this, but this is one of those topics that deserves some attention.

And I know from the feedback I've received that many of you are interested in this topic, so we're going to spend the next three episodes on this important event in the history of English.

And then we'll pick back up with our regular historical narrative and move into the 1500s.

Now, one of the reasons why the Great Vow Shift is so important to the history of English is because it marks a transition point in the language.

Over the course of the podcast, there are two events that seem to come up over and over again.

The first is the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, and the other is the Great Vowel Shift.

Both of those events come up a lot because they're transition points.

The Norman Conquest helped to trigger the transition from Old English to Middle English, and the Great Vowel Shift was a major factor in the transition from Middle to Modern English.

The vowel shift reshaped the pronunciation of the language into the language we have today.

Now even though the Norman Conquest and the Great Vowel Shift are very important events in the history of English, there is a big difference between the two.

The impact of the Norman Conquest is well known and generally understood, but the Great Vowel Shift is shrouded in a bit of mystery.

While it's easy to say that the long vowel sounds in English shifted around during the 1400s and 1500s, it's difficult to convey the details.

It can be very technical and dry, and in fact, linguists still don't agree on all of those details.

They also aren't even sure why it happened in the first place.

While early linguists were aware that the pronunciation of certain vowel sounds had changed between the time of Chaucer and the time of Shakespeare, they tended to see it as a random series of changes, a period of instability in the language.

But in the early 1900s, a Danish linguist named Otto Jespersen looked a little closer at what happened in English.

And where others saw chaos, Jespersen saw order.

He recognized that most of the long vowel sounds were raised during the 1400s and 1500s.

Generally speaking, all of the long vowel sounds shifted upward one position, and came to be pronounced with the adjacent vowel sound, the sound that was one step higher.

He saw all of these changes as being tied together in what linguists call a chain shift, so they all moved together, either at the same time or in a series of related movements.

These types of shifts usually affect a small number of vowel sounds, but for some reason this particular vowel shift affected all of the long vowel sounds in English.

Apparently they all moved in relation to each other.

It was Jesperson who coined the term the great vowel shift.

He wrote that the great vowel shift consisted of a quote great raising of all long vowels end quote.

Now hopefully you listened to the last episode, episode 140, and if you did, Jesperson's comments may actually make some sense.

We saw last time that each vowel sound is made in a specific part of the oral cavity, and the vowel sounds that are located next to each other in the mouth sometimes shift back and forth over time, because there's nothing to block the movement between them.

So what Jesperson was describing was a phenomenon whereby all of the vowel sounds shifted to the position next door.

to the position that was one step higher, and the highest two vowels essentially moved out of the way and shifted down toward the central part of the mouth.

Again, this process only affected the vowels that were pronounced as long vowels, where the pronunciations were stretched out a bit.

When the vowels were pronounced as short quick vowels, they tended to stay in place and didn't move.

So in order to make some sense out of all of that, we really need to understand the positions that the vowels occupy in the mouth.

And that's why I wanted to take you through that in the last episode.

I should also make one other point here, a point of clarification.

Even though many linguists speak of vowels in terms of the position they occupy in the mouth, and they use illustrations that outline those relative positions, it's important to note that the oral cavity is just that, a cavity or open space.

So the sound itself doesn't really occur in any specific part of the mouth.

The sound occurs throughout the mouth.

The position or location really refers to what the tongue is doing.

So when a linguist describes the E sound as a high front vowel, what they really mean is that the tongue is raised slightly and placed in that position.

As you progress downward from E to A to E and so on, the tongue itself lowers and flattens out a bit.

The same thing happens in the back of the mouth.

When we pronounce the highest back vowel sound, oo,

there's a slight raising of the back part of the tongue toward that position.

And as we move lower, from u to o to aw, and so on, once again the tongue lowers and flattens out a bit.

So technically speaking, the positions relate to what the tongue is doing.

But it's easier to think about specific vowels being articulated in specific parts of the mouth because that makes it easier to visualize what's going on, and it makes it easier to follow these types of vowel shifts when one sound starts to be pronounced like the sound next to it.

As I noted last time, the pronunciation of vowel sounds is far from precise.

Even among people who speak with the same accent, a particular vowel sound can vary a little bit from one speaker to the next.

There's usually a range of acceptable pronunciations of any given vowel sound.

That range can vary over time.

Sometimes people extend their vowel sounds into the spaces occupied by the neighboring vowels.

They might pronounce

as a

or a,

but it can also work the other way.

Where the pronunciations vary quite a bit, speakers may restrict those different pronunciations back down to one sound.

That's one way that a vowel shift occurs.

The vowel is pronounced in different ways for a while and then settles down on a new and slightly different pronunciation.

Sometimes this process can affect one specific vowel sound, or that vowel sound and its neighbor.

But sometimes the instability causes a chain reaction.

As the pronunciation of one vowel sound expands to encompass its neighboring sound, the pronunciation of that neighboring sound can also expand.

Sometimes it has to expand to prevent a merger.

As we've seen, vowels can merge together, but when that happens, you get a lot of new words that are pronounced the same way.

Now, languages can deal with that phenomenon up to a point, but there is a limit.

At some point, when vowel sounds start to expand and crash together, you get so many words that are pronounced the same way that communication starts to be a problem.

If I'm feeling a bit overweight and my doctor tells me that I'm getting fat, it will probably cause me to eat a little less and exercise more.

But if his accent changes and he starts to raise his a sound up to e,

then instead of telling me that I'm getting fat, he may tell me that I'm getting fit.

And that may lead me to think that I'm in great shape.

and I can throw out that diet and cancel my gym membership.

So vowel shifts can create problems.

To account for for those problems, people will try to keep those words distinct.

So if fat starts to sound like fit,

people may start to compensate by slightly changing the pronunciation of fit to something else.

Maybe fet or fit or some other closely related sound.

That's how chain shifts occur.

To prevent those sounds from crashing together and creating confusion in the language, people have a tendency to adjust their vowel sounds to keep words distinct.

It produces a chain reaction, sort of like falling dominoes.

A change in one vowel sound produces a series of related changes as the neighboring vowel sounds adjust.

Now, this type of chain shift usually affects a small group of closely related vowels, but for some reason, this type of chain shift affected all of the long vowels in English from the 1400s through the 1600s.

And arguably, it's never completely stopped.

Now, Jesperson's orderly process has been questioned by other linguists.

They suggest that the process wasn't orderly at all, that there was an extended period of linguistic confusion where the vowel sounds in many words could be pronounced multiple ways.

And over time, as people adopted and settled on certain specific pronunciations, the vowel sounds became a bit more fixed, and we ended up with the vowel sounds we have today.

And they they would say that the process only looks orderly in retrospect if we compare the Middle English sounds to the modern English sounds, and if we try to draw out certain patterns based on those changes.

To make this point, they note that the changes were not uniform throughout Britain.

The changes were far more extensive in the south of England, where the standard dialect of English emerged, but the changes were more limited in the north.

Also, as we'll see, there were many exceptions and irregularities, irregularities, and there were also cases where the vowel sounds actually did crash into each other and merge.

And some vowel sounds didn't just move next door.

They kept moving and ultimately ended up several steps away from where they began.

Now this difference in perspective among scholars points to the fact that many of the details of the great vowel shift are still disputed, and they remain the subject of much debate.

For example, there's still no agreement about the cause of the shift.

Some linguists tend to think that it was caused by some major social upheaval.

Others tend to think it was a natural development within the language.

For those who think that there was an outside influence that spurred the changes, they often point to the social disruptions that stemmed from the Black Death in the mid-1300s.

The argument goes something like this.

As we saw in previous episodes, the massive plague that swept across England and the rest of Europe disrupted the feudal system and allowed peasants that were previously tied to the land to negotiate for their labor services.

Many of them left the manors and moved to towns and cities.

That led to a significant migration from the countryside to cities like London.

It's estimated that the population of London in the year 1500 was about 75,000 people.

A century later, it had tripled to over 200,000 people.

About 50 years after that, it had doubled again to around 450,000 people.

With people pouring into cities like London from the countryside, there was suddenly a great mixture of dialects in those cities.

That was especially true for London, which was relatively close to most of the major dialect regions at the time, except those in the far north.

So people would have been pronouncing the same words very differently, often with different vowel vowel sounds.

Over the course of that period, from the 1400s through the 1600s, speakers gradually settled on certain common pronunciations, and the vowel sounds stabilized.

There may have also been social factors at work, like the preference for one particular dialect or manner of speech among several competing options, because that dialect was seen as more prestigious and more proper.

At any rate, by the end of that period, a new system of vowel pronunciations had emerged.

Now that's a very simplified version of the view advocated by some scholars.

Another view suggests that vowel shifts are actually very common within languages, given the fact that vowels are pronounced in the open cavity of the mouth, and therefore tend to be a bit unstable.

So this alternate view assumes that the vowel changes were part of a natural process, and weren't really dependent on outside influences, like the migration of people from the countryside to the cities.

Many of these scholars point to the fact that the Chinese language also experienced a large-scale vowel shift over a thousand years ago in the 800s.

And more limited chain shifts have also been identified within most of the other Germanic languages, even though they didn't experience a wholesale shift of all the long vowel sounds like in English.

For example, the German word for white is weiss.

The two words evolved out of the same Germanic root, which was something like huit.

And even though the vowel sound changed over time within both languages, notice that both modern words have the same vowel sound today.

Also, note that the German word for house is almost identical to the English word.

They're both pronounced as house.

Again, they came from the same Germanic root word, which was husun.

In standard English, the vowel evolved from hus to house,

and obviously the German word has experienced a similar change.

So again, some of the changes that took place in English have parallels in other Germanic languages, and that's led some scholars to argue that the English changes were just part of a natural process.

But even for those who find parallels in other Germanic languages, The fact is that the changes within English were much more extensive.

Again, the great vowel shift affected all of the long vowel sounds within English, not just some of them.

So the ultimate cause of the great vowel shift remains a bit of a mystery.

There are some interesting theories, but there's no real consensus or agreement among scholars.

The same is also true for the timing and sequence of the shifts.

Some scholars think the highest vowel sounds shifted first, and that opened up the space for the lower vowel sounds to move up higher.

However, there are alternate views.

Some scholars think some of the lower vowels moved up first and that pushed the higher vowels out of the way.

There are also theories that the vowels all moved at the same time, sort of like a game of musical chairs, where they all shifted around in unison.

It's difficult to establish a definitive answer from the surviving documents, but there is very strong evidence based on the way words were spelled that the highest vowel sounds moved very early on.

So that's the version that I'm presenting here, that the highest vowels shifted out of the way and the lower vowels moved up to fill the gaps.

It's a somewhat traditional view of the great vowel shift, but again it's a view, not necessarily the only or the definitive view.

So with that bit of background out of the way, Let's delve into those vowel changes.

And again, this time we're going to focus on the changes in the upper front part of the mouth.

We'll deal with the other vowel sounds over the next couple of episodes.

Last time, I took you through the location where each of the front vowels is pronounced, and I gave you the mnemonic: eat aged eggs at Ollie's.

That little phrase illustrates the order of the vowels pronounced in the front part of the mouth, from highest to lowest.

The highest is e.

Then one step down, we we have A,

and then we move down to A.

This time we're going to focus on those two highest vowels, E and A.

During the course of the great vowel shift, each of those sounds shifted higher or further back, sort of like a conveyor belt.

And these appear to be two of the earliest changes that can be confirmed via spellings in the surviving documents.

In fact, I've touched on both of these changes in earlier episodes.

So let's start at the top.

The highest vowel sound in the front part of the mouth is the E sound.

Again, I'm not talking about the letter E.

I'm just talking about the actual sound that comes out of your mouth.

It's the sound that you hear in words like feet

and dream and brief and elite.

and ski.

As those words indicate, that sound can actually be spelled a lot of different ways.

It's a common vowel sound, and it's been a common sound within English from the very beginning.

But during the late Middle English period, most of the words that had that sound started to be pronounced differently.

Over the next three or four centuries, that sound continued to evolve, and it eventually ended up as the sound that we pronounce today as I.

So, to Geoffrey Chaucer, a specific point in the day was the team,

but to us it's the time.

To Chaucer, a married woman, or in some cases even an unmarried woman, was a weif.

To us, she is a wife.

To Chaucer, the number after eight was nin.

To us, that number is nine.

That's the ultimate evolution of that sound.

As I've noted before, that e vowel sound was traditionally spelled with letter I.

We hear that original sound in a word like ski, which was borrowed in the modern era.

But of course, we generally use that letter for the I sound today,

in words like those I just mentioned, time, wife, and nine.

In fact, that's how the letter I came to be called the letter I.

Not to confuse you too much, but it was once called E, because that was the sound it represented.

But as I just noted, the E sound gradually evolved into the I sound, and the letter followed along with that change, both the name of the letter and the sound it represents.

In the prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer used the word ride.

After all, the pilgrims were riding to Canterbury.

But he would have pronounced it read,

and at least in some places he spelled it R I D E, just like we do today.

Over time, the pronunciation shifted from read to ride, but that common spelling remained the same.

So the letter went along for the ride, no pun intended.

And today, the letter has that newer I sound within English.

But other European languages didn't make that change.

Most of them continued to use the letter I to represent its traditional E sound, and English continued to borrow words from those languages after the sound had shifted within English.

So when those words came into English, they came in with their E sounds, which were still represented by letter I.

That's why we still use the letter I to spell the E sound in words like ski and police and elite and spaghetti.

As I noted last time, that actually gives us a good general rule to use to distinguish an older word that predates the great vowel shift from a more recent loan word that came in later.

When you look at a word where the letter I represents the I sound, like in time, vine, life,

five, right,

side, child, like, and so on, you're normally looking at an old word that went through the vowel shift.

But when you look at a word where the letter I represents the E sound, like ski, police, elite, machine, and so on, you're normally looking at a loan word that came into English after the Great Vowel Shift with its original sound intact.

That's also why VINE is pronounced Vine,

but R-A-V-I-N-E is pronounced ravine.

Vine is an older word that went through the vowel shift.

but ravine is a newer word that was borrowed after the shift.

Ravine is first recorded in English in the late 1500s.

We see a similar situation with LICE, which is pronounced lice,

as compared with P O L I C E, which is pronounced police.

Again, lice is older, going all the way back to Old English, and it went through the vowel shift.

But police is a French loanword that came in later and retains its original vowel sound.

Sometimes we find English words that are still a bit unsettled with both pronunciations, like either and either and neither and neither.

Today there tends to be a regional divide in the pronunciation of those words, but that regional divide only developed over the past couple of centuries.

We also have a few loan words that were borrowed into English after the vowel shift with their original e sound, but the sound has started to drift over to the I sound in the modern era.

Think about the various pronunciations of ANTI.

Some people say ante and some people say anti.

It's ultimately a Greek prefix that came into English from French and Latin in the 1500s.

It came in with its original pronunciation as ante,

but over time some speakers have anglicized it to anti.

So in a way it has experienced the pull of the great vowel vowel shift several centuries after the shift was supposedly complete.

Another example is the Latin word spelled via,

meaning by way of.

It also came in after the great vowel shift with its original vowel sound, pronounced the.

But many English speakers have converted it into via.

So again, we still hear the lingering effect of that old vowel shift on some of these words.

These dual pronunciations also provide a clue as to how the vowel shift might have occurred in the first place.

There was probably a period in the 1400s when there were lots of words that could be pronounced both ways, and over time people gradually settled on the I pronunciation.

So if that history is a guide, it suggests that pronunciations like anti and via may eventually give way to anti- and via.

At any rate, it might be be helpful to think of this first vowel shift as the via via shift, because it's a shift that's still reflected in words like that.

Now we've seen that this vowel sound shifted from e to I,

but let's look a little closer at that change because it wasn't as simple as I've made it sound.

The sound actually went through an intermediate stage before it ended up as I,

and this little bit of detail is important to understand how the great vowel shift presumably got underway.

At some point in the late 1300s, and some scholars think it might have even been sooner than that in some places, English speakers started to change the way they pronounced that e sound when it was pronounced as a long vowel.

Instead of saying e, which is a pure vowel sound, they began to put a little sound in front of it.

And that new sound was a.

Last time I mentioned that this sound is called schwa, and it's pronounced in the middle part of the oral cavity.

So instead of saying e,

people started to say a

or a when pronounced in normal speech.

You might remember that when two vowel sounds are combined, it's called a diphthong.

So linguists would say that speakers converted the pure vowel e into a diphthong, a.

Now let's think about that change in terms of location and position.

The original E sound is the highest vowel sound that can be pronounced in the front part of the mouth.

And this

sound is produced more in the middle of the mouth.

So whereas before this vowel was pronounced in the highest position in the front of the mouth, it now started to be pronounced in two different places.

The pronunciation started in the center of the the mouth and moved forward.

The new sound was clearly distinct from the old sound.

And since the old sound was no longer being used, that allowed the vowel sound pronounced underneath to move up and fill the gap.

But more on that later.

So we've seen that the high E vowel was now being pronounced as a,

beginning in the center of the mouth and sliding forward.

But the shift wasn't done yet.

A couple of centuries later, in the 1600s and 1700s, it shifted again.

The initial sound dropped from

in the center of the mouth down to a in the lower part of the mouth.

So instead of saying I,

people began to say I

or I in normal speech.

And that's how we got the modern I sound.

Even though we might think of the I sound as a single vowel because we spell it with a single letter, it's actually two sounds put together.

It's the a sound followed by the e sound.

That's why I didn't talk about that sound in the last episode, because it's not a pure vowel sound.

It's a diphthong.

So, in order to trace that evolution, let me give you a few examples.

Whereas Chaucer would have said team in the 1300s, Shakespeare would have probably said teim in the late 1500s, and we would say Time today.

Tim, Teim,

Time.

And whereas Chaucer would have said Nin

and Shakespeare would have said Nein, we would say nine.

Nin,

nine,

nine.

If you try to mimic those pronunciations, you'll hear how the sound actually moves back and lower each time.

No one really knows why why that shift happened, but it was essential to the great vowel shift because, as I noted earlier, it cleared the way for the other front vowels to move up as part of a larger chain shift.

So today, in modern English, we still have the sounds at the beginning and at the end of that shift, the E sound and the I sound.

But what about that sound in the middle, the A sound?

It was common during the time of Shakespeare, but it largely disappeared when the sound dropped down to the modern I sound.

But here's something you may find interesting.

That sound can still be found in some English dialects, and those dialects have that sound due to a more recent vowel shift within those particular dialects that mirrors what happened during the Great Vowel Shift.

In other words, the same sound shift happened again, at least the first step in the shift.

Here's what happened.

In the 1700s and 1800s, after the Great Vowel Shift was complete, people in and around London started to change the way they pronounced their E sound.

That sound was still a common sound in English, but due to the Great Vowel Shift, it was found in a brand new set of words.

And in those words that had acquired that sound during the Great Vowel Shift, those speakers started to change the vowel sound again.

And just like their ancestors had done three or four centuries earlier, they shifted that sound from E

to A.

And that's more evidence for the theory that these types of changes are natural changes within the language.

At any rate, this new pronunciation became common in the working-class accents spoken in London, which became known as Cockney.

And shortly thereafter, there was a significant migration from London to the new colony of Australia.

And this same feature pops up in Australian accents as well.

In fact, there are lots of similarities between the Cockney accent and the Australian accent due to that close historic link.

So I thought it might be interesting to hear this pronunciation as it exists today in those two accents.

Let me play you a few samples from listeners where you can hear a modern version of this same vowel shift.

First, we have Matt from London who read two of the sentences I provided on the website.

The first sentence is the ten steel beams are still supporting the tin roof.

That sentence features the word beam which has that long e sound.

And the second sentence is we had to prepare a meal with only a tomato, an egg, and a block of goat cheese.

That sentence features the word cheese, which also has that long E sound.

Notice in these sentences that we hear the word beam pronounced more like beam, and the word cheese pronounced more like cheese.

The ten still beams are still supporting the tin roof.

We had to prepare a meal with only a tomato, an egg, and a block of goat cheese.

Now let's listen to a few samples from Australia.

First we have Lisa from Canberra.

Again notice the pronunciations of beams and cheese.

Ten steel beams are still supporting the tin roof.

We had to prepare a meal with only a tomato, an egg and a block of goat cheese.

Now let's listen to John from Melbourne reading the same two sentences.

The ten steel beams are still supporting the tin roof.

We had to prepare a meal with only a tomato, an egg and a block of goat cheese.

Finally, here's a clip from Jeff in Australia, and notice how Jeff catches himself when he pronounces beams.

The ten steel beams are still supporting this tin roof.

Well, that should be the ten steel beams are still supporting the tin roof, not the beams.

We had to prepare a meal with only a tomato, an egg, and a block of goat cheese.

I hope you could hear that vowel sound.

Again, that vowel is not common in standard English anymore, but it does exist in these specific dialects, and it exists due to a later vowel shift that was similar to the shift that occurred in the early stages of the great vowel shift.

So we've just covered the first major vowel change in the great vowel shift, the shift from e to a

to i.

The important thing to take from that discussion is that the e sound changed to a new sound.

That meant that that the E sound wasn't really being used anymore.

So other words could now use that sound without creating any confusion or overlap with the words that had that sound before.

So, for example, the word bite was pronounced as beat before the Great Vowel Shift.

That's how Chaucer would have said it.

But when beat became bait on its way to bite,

it meant that there was no word pronounced as beat anymore.

But there was a type of root vegetable grown in gardens called a bet,

and now the pronunciation of that root vegetable expanded.

Some people still called it a bet,

but some people started to pronounce that vowel a little bit higher.

They called it a beet.

And that was okay because the old verb beat was evolving into bite.

So there wasn't any risk that someone would say, I like to beat beets.

They would say, I like to bite beets.

And a couple of centuries later, they would say, I like to bite beets.

So if that old root vegetable called a bait started to be pronounced as a beet, it was okay.

There was no merger or overlapping.

And if you followed that example, then you followed the second major step in the great vowel shift.

Remember our old mnemonic, eat aged eggs.

That phrase illustrates the front vowels in descending order, e, e,

e.

So at the top we have the e sound that we just looked at, and immediately beneath that high e sound is the a sound.

It was found in a lot of words in Middle English.

And when that high e sound shifted to a diphthong, words with that slightly lower a sound started to fill the gap that was left behind.

So in other words, the long A sound was raised up to E.

That's how that root vegetable, known as a bait, became known as a beat.

And that's also why the phrase bite a beat didn't create any confusion at the time.

No one said beat a beat, because the verb had already shifted to bait.

So bite and beat never crashed into each other.

This type of order in spacing was usually maintained in the Great Vowel Shift.

It appears that speakers generally tried to avoid mergers.

If two different vowel sounds crashed together, it would create a bunch of words that sounded the same, and that would create a lot of confusion in the language.

So, again, in order to maintain some degree of order, vowel sounds usually moved together in a chain shift.

That kept the words distinct from each other.

So let's look a little closer at this second vowel shift from A to E.

There were lots of words affected by this shift.

For example, beit became beat,

tre became tree,

be

became be,

sweet became sweet,

breiff became brief, and so on.

Again, in terms of location, this second highest front vowel, e,

moved up and occupied the position of the highest front vowel, e.

The original sound of this vowel was traditionally spelled with letter e,

and once again the sound changed, but the spellings remained the same.

So as the sound shifted up to e, the letter also started to be called e,

and that's how the letter got its name in English.

But just as we saw before, other European languages continue to use letter E to represent that older A sound.

And English has borrowed quite a few of those words since the Great Vowel Shift ended.

And that's why the letter E represents that other sound in more recent loanwords, like café, fiancée, résumé, saute,

ballet, buffet,

and gourmet.

Once again, we can turn that into a good general rule.

When we have a word where the letter E represents the E sound, it's probably an old word that went through the great vowel shift.

But when we have a word where the letter E represents the A sound, it's probably a newer loan word that was borrowed after the vowel shift was complete, and therefore avoided the effects of the vowel shift.

We have one really good example of this in modern English.

It's the words medley and melee.

Both words are ultimately derived from the same old French root word meaning to mix or mingle.

Medley was borrowed into English in the 1300s, so it went through the Great Vowel Shift.

The pronunciation shifted from medley to medley.

But then in the 1600s, after the Great Vowel Shift, English borrowed another version of the same word.

That was the word melee.

And of course, melee has the original vowel pronunciation as A.

So between the words melee and medley, we can hear the vowel shift at work.

We also have a few words in English that can be pronounced either way.

The word spelled S-H-E-I-K

or S-H-E-I-K-H

was borrowed from Arabic in the 1500s, and it can be pronounced as either sheikh or sheikh in modern English.

And we also have the word spelled g-e-i-s-h-a from Japanese, and at least in American English, it can be pronounced as either geisha or geisha.

So there's still a bit of fluctuation between those sounds today.

Now let's look a little closer at the impact of this change on English spelling.

As we've seen, the sound began as A

before it shifted to E,

And scribes used the letter E to represent that original A sound, like in café and resume.

But it was also common for Middle English scribes to distinguish the short A sound from the long A sound.

They often did that by doubling the letter for the long sound.

As I discussed in an earlier episode of the podcast, that was a common technique used by scribes.

Just double the vowel letter for a long long vowel sound.

I mean it made perfect sense.

So it was common for many of these words with the long A sound to be spelled with double E's.

And when the sound shifted up to E,

the spellings remained the same.

So those double E's were now found in lots of words that were pronounced with an E sound.

And that explains why many of those words are spelled with a double E to day, like tree, C,

feet, meet, beet, sweet, weak, seam, cheese, needle, and so on.

All of that seems pretty straightforward.

But scribes also had a different way to represent that original long A sound.

Rather than using those double E's, they sometimes adopted the French practice of spelling that sound with IE.

Again, that was a common Anglo-Norman spelling used in French loanwords.

And when the vowel sound in those words shifted up to E,

that IE spelling was retained.

So it now represented the E sound.

And that explains the spellings of words like brief, chief, grief, relief, achieve, retrieve, nice,

siege, pierce, and peace, P-I-E-C-E.

Those are all French loan words with the French spelling IE, and they were all borrowed into English before the Great Vowel Shift, so they all experienced this vowel change from A to E,

and they're all pronounced with the E vowel sound today.

After the vowel shift was completed, scribes and printers started to extend that French spelling to native English words as well.

So in some cases, the IE spelling replaced a more traditional E or double E spelling.

As a result, native words like thief, fiend, belief, field, yield, shield, and wield all received their modern IE spellings.

Now I should mention that this spelling sometimes competed with an alternate EI spelling with the letters reversed.

In fact, a lot of the words I just mentioned could be spelled both ways in the period immediately after the Great Vowel Shift.

But the IE spelling was preferred and won out over time.

In fact, it was so common that it eventually gave birth to the rule we know today as I before E, except after C.

There was a small group of words borrowed from French that ended in sites or sieve, and they tended to use the alternate spelling.

Specifically, those words were receit, receive, deceit, deceive, conceit, conceive, and perceive.

Those were the exceptions that gave birth to the accept after see part.

The spelling of the word sealing was later revised, apparently to mirror those other exceptions.

So those were the only eight exceptions that gave birth to the accept after C part.

But as I discussed in an earlier earlier episode, this rule only works if we're talking about words where those spellings represent the E sound.

When those spellings are applied to other sounds, the rule completely breaks down, but it works pretty well for these E sounding words that emerged after the Great Vowel Shift.

It shows that English prefers the I before E spelling for the E sound, and that preference probably stems from the fact that IE was was a common spelling for the sound both before and after the Great Vowel Shift.

That's why we generally represent the long E sound to day with either E

or IE.

The first is a native English spelling, the second is a borrowed French spelling, but they both survived the Great Vowel Shift.

So we've now covered two of the vowel shifts that took place very early on in the Great Vowel Shift, and both were probably completed by the late 1400s.

A moved up to E,

and E moved out of the way and eventually became I.

I noted earlier that a few centuries after the Great Vowel Shift occurred, there was another more limited vowel shift that took place in and around London, and that later London shift helped to define the local Cockney accent.

That London vowel shift featured the same vowel sounds that we've explored in this episode.

As we saw earlier, E became the diphthong A,

which mirrored the Great Vowel Shift a few centuries earlier.

And the slightly lower A sound also shifted to a new position.

But unlike in the Great Vowel Shift, where it moved up to fill the gap left by E,

in this later London shift, it actually shifted to a diphthong somewhere between A and I.

And I mention this other London vowel shift because it explains one of the most distinctive features of the modern Cockney accent.

It explains why Cockney speakers sometimes pronounce day

as something like die

and train as train and span as spine.

This particular aspect of Cockney speech was famously featured in the film My Fair Lady, based on George Bernard Shaw's stage play called Pygmalion.

The phonetics professor Henry Higgins tries to teach Eliza Doolittle to lose her Cockney accent and speak in a more standard way.

And he takes aim at this particular vowel shift from E to I, which was such a prominent feature of the Cockney accent.

All right, Eliza, say it again.

The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.

The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.

Didn't I say that?

No, Eliza, you didn't say that.

You didn't even say that.

Every night before you get into bed where you used to say your prayers, I want you to say, the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain fifty times.

You get much further with the Lord if you learn not to offend his ears.

Well, that was a little harsh.

Of course, Audrey Hepburn, who played Eliza Doolittle, didn't actually speak with a Cockney accent.

She just used one for the part.

So let me play a sample from an actual native speaker to get a sense for this sound.

This is a clip from a dialect collection featured in the book English Accents and Dialects by Arthur Hughes, Peter Chudgill, and Dominic Watt.

This clip features a native speaker who is apparently talking about the aftermath of a surgical procedure and the dressings associated with it.

You should be able to hear words like lay, paper, anyway, and day pronounced more like lay, paper, anyway, and die.

I came back to the bed after breakfast.

I just like laying on it a bit and reading the paper.

I don't know, I thought, well, I feel wet in my pajamas.

And I looked inside, I put me in there.

I ain't spilled any tea or anything down there.

So I thought, over in the ablution place like there, they've got some little radiators, all little individual faces.

Got a little radiator, the dressing that was on me, that was soaked in a

watery blood.

So she brought me in a new pair of jars in the afternoon.

I went and changed them.

And anyway, it was a long while before this doctor came up.

It was only like the young one, so we came on.

But anyway, the sisters used to go right, she said, you don't seem to be coming, so she had a look.

And she said, it's my decision, she wouldn't let me home.

And I always pleaded with her.

I said, well, they're coming here in a little while.

I said, if you'd have told me before, I said, I would have made arrangements and cancelled it.

Anyway, she was still worried, so she went and she found this young doctor.

He came along, and he has a look.

And well, he said, he doesn't seem to be weeping now.

He said, I don't think he'll weep anymore.

He said, he said, well, if I let you go home, he said, he said, I have to be dressed twice a day.

He said, and he said, twice a day, he said, while it comes away a bit wet.

He said, and once a day he said, when it's dry, sort of thing.

Now, as I noted earlier, there was a significant migration from the London area to Australia in the 1800s.

And this working-class London dialect proved to be a heavy influence on the early Australian dialect.

So once again, we find this same feature among some Australian speakers.

It's more typical among those who speak with a broad Australian accent.

Of course, you'll hear it in the well-known Australian greeting, goodie, for good day.

And sometimes, you'll hear this type of broad Australian accent referred to as Strein, which is a slurred pronunciation of the word Australian.

Now, I received a lot of voice samples from Australia, but very few of the speakers had this type of broad accent, so I wasn't able to capture this sound very well in those samples.

However, there was a very well-known person who had that type of accent.

It was Steve Irwin, also known as the Crocodile Hunter.

Of course, we have lots of surviving audio from him, and his speech routinely featured these types of pronunciations.

Here's a short clip from him where you'll hear the word age pronounced as age and male, as in the gender male, pronounced as mile.

Hippos are Africa's second largest mammal.

So behind me, probably got around about 30 cows, one big bull over 20, and there's a couple of younger bulls.

They've reached sexual maturity, which happens at around 7 to 10 years of age.

And there's a couple of bulls out on the perimeter.

They're not allowed in near the girls.

And that's fair enough.

Now that one in front there, that's the biggest bull male.

He'd be well over 20 years of age and that's a subordinate male and he's just making sure that that young bloke doesn't get in on his girls.

So in clips like that we hear a more recent vowel shift that took place in London and then expanded with migration to Australia.

Admittedly, those more recent developments are a bit of a digression, but I wanted to mention them here because they involve the same two vowel sounds that we explored as part of this episode about the Great Vowel Shift, and they point to the fact that the changes associated with the vowel shift were not a one-time occurrence.

Vowels have continued to shift ever since, and very often the more recent changes either mirror or closely resemble the changes that took place five or six centuries ago.

They just tend to be on a smaller scale, limited to a few specific vowel sounds.

But all of this provides a lot of evidence for those who argue that the great vowel shift was a natural development within the language, and it points to a tendency for vowels to either raise higher or turn into diphthongs over time.

So we'll stop there for now.

We've covered the early developments that took place high in the front part of the mouth.

Next time, we'll continue our look at the great vowel shift by focusing on what happened with the lower vowels in the front part of the mouth.

That That part of the story is fascinating because it actually features the merger of some of these shifting vowel sounds as they crashed together.

And it helps to explain why words like M-E-E-T and M-E-A-T are pronounced the same way, but spelled differently.

And it also explains why S-P-E-A-K is pronounced speak,

but S-T-E-A-K is pronounced stake.

This part of the story is probably the most complicated part of the great vowel shift, but it's an extremely important part of the story.

So next time, we'll explore those changes, and we'll see how those changes are reflected in other accents of modern English.

So until then, thanks for listening to the History of English podcast.