The Great Vowel Shift and the History of Britain.

recently we did an episode on ketchup and of course today ketchup is mostly made from tomatoes and that led a viewer to send me a question about the English pronunciation of the word tomato and asked me well which one is correct and that is a popular question because of a song written by George and Ira Gershwin for the 1937 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie shall we dance with the lyrics you say tomato and I say tomato you say potato and I say potato let's call the whole thing off in the the song says a lot of things about class and culture but the real point of the song is that the difference is unimportant I mean after all tomatoes and tomatoes are the same thing but how tomato and tomato came to be pronounced differently is an interesting historical question because history surprisingly affects language and in the history of language a change that would have changed the pronunciation of the word tomato and virtually the whole of the English language stands out as a shining example of the intimate connection between historical events and the words that describe them the period of the rapid transformation of the pronunciation of English that was called the great vowel shift deserves to be remembered the great vowel shift or gvs refers to a period of radical change in how the English language is spoken the shift roughly occurred in England between the mid 14th century in the 18th century although some argue that it may have started earlier and did later the term itself was coined by Otto Jespersen a Danish linguist and anglicized whose focus at the time was on the history of language Jesperson described the GPS in his 1909 work a modern English grammar on historical principles the GPS represents the transition from middle english to modern english and it mostly affected the so called long vowels although it affected some consonants as well the description of exactly how it occurred is still a matter of scholarly disputed didn't occur evenly over either geography or time that is to say that affected Scotland in northern England and southern England differently and at different times and it occurred in bits and starts over a period of centuries but while other languages have undergone vowel shifts the significant transformation and how English was pronounced over just a few centuries was well exceptional as to the actual pronunciation differences I'll largely leave that up to linguist to describe but the shift significantly affected how words with long vowels were pronounced the word bite for example with a long I would have in the Middle English of southern England been pronounced like the word beat whereas beat would have been pronounced more like the word bade which would have pronounced something like bot and all that means that Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare would have had difficulty having a conversation with each other well we modern English speakers can read Chaucer's Middle English and are usually forced to some time in high school Chaucer's pronunciation would have been almost completely unintelligible to the modern ear the English of William Shakespeare after the great vowel shift on the other hand would be accented but quite understandable that of course leaves the interesting question of how we would know how these words were pronounced differently since there's no sound recording from the time and the question is part of the reason that there's still disagreement over exactly how the gb/s occurred but it can be divined from Clues such as what words poets rind or playwrights used as pawns Chaucer rhymed words that Shakespeare did not Chaucer for example rhymed the word daffy meaning you can't hear with the word life which was then spelled ly F today the words life and death don't rhyme but in Chaucer's time they did they were pronounced deef and lief another example is how people spelled words in personal correspondence Elizabeth the first spelled deep di PE and need an ID this indicates that by her time words spelled with a E had already at pronunciation from the a sound of middle English to the long e sound we use in modern English from Depp and Ned to deep and need so her use of the spelling of middle English where I was pronounced e indicates the pronunciation of early modern English after the great vowel shift - there were scholars at the time noting some of the changes and some even proposed new systems of spelling to represent the changes those can help us understand how the changes occurred but while the question of how the shift occurred is interesting the question of why is even more perplexing and there's even less agreement among scholars about that but somehow history change language what happened in England and the approximately 160 years between Geoffrey Chaucer's death and William Shakespeare's birth that made it so that to acknowledge masters of the English language could not have understood each other speaking their own version of English how did history transform language it's a difficult question to answer there's little agreement because scholars can't even agree over when the great vowel shift began one of the most significant factors has been suggested to explain the rapid shift in language was population migration pronunciation buried in medieval England where the typical person never wandered farther afield than a dozen miles from their home areas developed dialects essentially regional languages but events in the 14th century drove greater migration and especially congregation in the cities which then brought together people who had different accents and dialects and the mixing of those changed the language part of the reason goes back to Norman rule after William the Conqueror's victory in 1066 the rulers of England primarily spoke French albeit the more country-bumpkin Norman French as opposed to Parisian French for the following three hundred years the language of the court and government was French while written language was mainly done in Latin but some 95 percent of the population still spoke English as the Norman rulers Youth English as a low and vulgar tongue it went unregulated and was mainly a spoken language rather than a written language combined with low population mobility that led to the development of regional dialects or at least a further diversion from dialects of Old English some linguists estimate that a common person in England in the 12th century would not be able to understand the English language spoken just fifty miles away but in the 14th century people moved the likely cause was the black play the first known case of the illness in England was a sailor from Gascony in June of 1348 by December the outbreak was estimated killed between 40 and 60 percent of the population the impacts of this mass depopulation were profound changing economics and culture but could it change language the initial reaction to the depopulation of the plague was for people to Fleet locations with high mortality rates like London but an interesting study published last year looking at data from medieval cities found a surprising result this the devastation of the plague and periodic return of the illness urban populations recovered to pre plague populations by the 16th century further research on abandoned rural villages and deforestation suggests that rural populations decreased over the same period and took more than a century more to return to the pre plague population the result is counterintuitive the general thought would be that places harder hit by the pandemic would recover more slowly both because their population was harder head and because people would be reticent to return to high mortality areas instead the data suggest that people moved from low mortality areas in the country to high mortality areas in the city the conclusion is that factors such as quality of land and human infrastructure such as roads and trade routes affected migration more than mortality rates as the population decreased people move from more marginal land and land with fewer amenities to areas with better agricultural land and more amenities the finding support the idea that southeast England including London saw a significant increase in immigration from the northern England following the pandemic this conclusion is supported by records that have been accumulated by the universities of York and Sheffield in England's immigrants database which tracks emigration to England between 1330 and 1550 in the period following the plague the resulting labor shortage meant a demand for labour thus conditions and wages were relatively good compared to many places in Europe that attracted immigrants from the rest of the British Isles Northwest Europe and even farther afield the research suggests as many as one in every hundred people in medieval England was an immigrant the result is not just a mixing of English dialects but of foreign loanwords over much of the period of the great vowel shift in loanwords particularly French loanwords or another part of the explanation the Normans brought a huge number of French words into the English language thousands of them those French words in pronunciations of course would transform language for example names for animals cow pig sheep although pronounced differently in Middle English than modern English came from English but the names for their meat beef pork mutton were derived from French courts of justice were also conducted largely in French so many Englishmen while still primarily speaking English also learned French but why would this mix of languages cause a vowel shift hundreds of years after the Norman Conquest well the French used by the court developed into a unique form called anglo-norman the Normans became increasingly anglicized over time Norman Nobles became increasingly likely to speak English as well as French the loss of Normandy to philip ii of france and 1204 meant that Norman Nobles started becoming more dependent upon their English holdings and divorced from the French Court and customs increasingly the people in power were speaking English but with a heavy French accent and were speaking a version of French that was highly influenced by English and the people who were not in power wanted to sound more like the people who were in power because it was more prestigious the effect of French loanwords on English pronunciation was further impacted by war with the French the series of conflicts that would be called the Hundred Years War began in 1337 the war itself might have impacted language in a few ways for example causing migration based on the recruitment and movement of troops and the number of Englishmen who spent time on the continent fighting in the wars but the war also created a resentment towards the French language as the language of the enemy Henry the fourth who to post his nephew Richard ii in 1399 was the first English King for whom English was his mother tongue and he took his oath in English this new aversion to French even as the conversion of french-speaking Nobles to english-speaking increase the use of loanwords may have caused an overcorrection when the pronunciation of French derived words was changed to sound less French this overcorrection might explain why a language so influenced by Romance languages ended up being pronounced so differently from them but this doesn't really explain why the change was so massive well some linguists think that that might be explained by something called a chain shift roughly speaking that means that a small change might cause a change somewhere else for example pronouncing a vowel one way differently might require them that another vowel be pronounced differently so that the two don't sound too much alike phonological systems tend to naturally seek economy and symmetry and well it's not as mechanistic as it sounds what it means is that a small shift might have driven a chain of shifts that led to something large like the great vowel shift one result of the great vowel shift is that it partially explains why English is so well difficult spread more or less haphazard over time in geography the great vowel shift did not apply uniformly to all relevant words for example the letter combination spelled ei was pronounced a in Middle English meek was met it went through a phase or was pronounced a meet would have been mate and then finally the long e sound it has today meet along with words like speak and being but some words got stuck along the way met became meet but stay which would originally have been pronounced stack got stuck in the middle at stake with words like great didn't move along to become steek and a few other words took another shift to a diphthong or combined vowel sound to make words like bear and swear in Middle English those words would have alright but in modern English that same vowel combination is pronounced three different ways it was roughly over the same period that printing in England was standardizing spelling in English some of the new standardized Spelling's missed the effects of the gb/s and thus many words in english are not written as they sound in Chaucer's time to e at the end of words would have been pronounced as with all consonants many of the sounds have become silent in smoking language but the letters were still retained in printing in other cases word spelling was changed and that obscured the relationship between them and the European languages from which they were derived there's more confusion as there's still many artifacts of middle English for example the word Shire every Britain will tell you that Buckinghamshire Oxfordshire and Bedfordshire are pronounced Buckinghamshire Oxfordshire and Bedford sure the reason is not laziness a dialect it's that the pronunciation of those names was set before the great vowel shift when Shire would have been pronounced Shearer those names are literally artifacts of anyone's past and speaking of England's past ween the conquerors Domesday book from which we've learned so much about England's past is pronounced doomsday but spelled Domesday do mes da why not because the Normans couldn't spell but because dome was pronounced doomed before the great vowel shift and so the Norman King who spoke French left us an artifact of middle English one of the most interesting things about the great vowel shift is that it didn't occur elsewhere on the continent I mean all languages are subject to some amount of vowel shift but the French language for example hardly changed over the same period even though the French faced the same plague and the same war the great vowel shift is an artifact of the uniqueness of English history of Norman Lords who spoke a bastardized form of French and of a language of a population that was considered so low class that went unregulated only to rise again and have to find its own path it's of a language that is permeated by foreign words whose foreign pronunciations at some points were considered desirable and at other points considered anathema as the nation found its identity it represents a period where England went from a backwater vassal of the French to a great nation in its own right of a period when the people moved from largely rural to much more urban it is a language that is as complex as the history of the English people so what about tomato and tomahto well Chaucer likely would have pronounced that tomahto except that tomatoes hadn't been introduced to England in Chaucer's time Shakespeare would have recognized what a tomato was but he likely would have pronounced it with the short a and called it a tomato in in modern English it was pronounced tomato for a very long time he was nothing but an affectation of 18th century upper-class Englishman in southern England that turned chance dance and Castle into Charles dolls and Castle and turned tomato into tomahto and like the song implies maybe that difference isn't all that important and we don't really have to call the whole thing off I hope you enjoyed this episode of the history guy short snippets a forgotten history between ten and fifteen minutes long and if you did enjoy please go ahead and click that thumbs up button if you have any questions or comments or suggestions for future episodes please write those in the comment section I will be happy to personally respond be sure to follow the history guy on Facebook Instagram Twitter and check out our merchandise on teespring com and if you'd like more episodes on forgotten history all you need to do is scribe [Music]

Channel: The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered

Views: 611,761

Rating: 4.9587336 out of 5

Keywords: history, the history Guy, history guy, english language, england, london, vowel shift, language development

Id: VOOAb7erAmE

Length: 15min 43sec (943 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/gwaydms]

Brilliant! Subscribed.

I have a few comments.

1. This guy reminds me a bit of Mark Russell. Although he was a political satirist, he skewered both sides equally, which is why I liked him.
2. I'd like to clarify the GVS "chain". This means, as one vowel sound changed, the sound of the vowel or diphthong that had produced that sound changed as well, etc, etc. (Yes, I know actual linguists understand this, but not everyone here does.)
3. William Caxton had a lot to say about the language he knew he was helping to set in place.
4. English, unlike French and several Continental languages, never had an Academy, to the dismay of Swift and other prescriptivists.

[u/holytriplem]

I was with him until the last bit where he says that French hardly changed during that period. The reason why French spelling is so weird is precisely because French pronunciation has changed as much as English has.

[u/Bunslow]

Fwiw, it's not clear at all that the GVS is unique to English. Although similar definitely didn't happen in French, similar shifts did occur in various forms of continental West Germanic, e.g. Dutch "bij" and "weg" have the same vowels as English "by" and "way".

[u/Granitium]

I consider myself very very lucky to have been born into an Anglophone society because It would’ve been a nightmare for me to learn English

[u/rolfk17]

So Chaucer rhymed deaf and life? Is that really what he says?

Never!

Just as nobody says potahto.

deaf was /d​ɛ:f/, life was /li:f/, so there certainly was no rhyme.