Talk:Great Vowel Shift/Archive 2

Push/pull chain shift
Hi, I think the GVS article needs to mention that it's a chain shift. It would also be nice to mention the debate on whether it's a push chain or a pull chain. --KJ 04:08, 28 March 2006 (UTC)


 * The evidence is conflicting. Or rather, different scholars have identified contradictory "triggers", i.e., some indicate the movement started low, some indicate an early diphthonization of the high vowels. Even the outcomes are conflicting. In northern dialects, /ū/ failed to shift (so Scots "wee hoose" and the like) but /ō/ was on the move anyway, failed to merge with /ū/ (which it might have) and fronts instead, to /ȫ/ in conservative dialects, /ǖ/ later. That certainly looks like a (frustrated) push-chain, but lo: in those same dialects, Old English /ā/ does NOT become /ō/ as it did to the south, but original /ā/ (as in gát "goat", hám "home") merges with the outcome of lengthened ă (as in name < OE năma): thus the Scots forms for home, goat spelled hame, gait or gate. So, if the behavior of /ō/ points to push-chain, what was pushing it? And if truth be known, in most shifts of any kind it's rather hard to tell whether pushing or pulling is involved. One begins to suspect that the neat division of shifts into the two types doesn't have much to do with the realities on the ground. And the practical consequences aren't obvious, either. In Australian English, /iy/ (as in bee) has  become [ɰi:]; the sequence /ir/ as in beer has lost all phonetic trace of the /r/ and is now [bi:] with a very high front totally monophthongal vowel. Now: did the vowel of bee jump, or was it pushed? And what difference does it make? Alsihler 21:33, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Fortunately, whoever named this phenomenon chose not to call it a Big Vowel Movement. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.20.192.87 (talk • contribs)
 * Haha, that would be bad. -Aknorals 11:30, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Layman's terms
Saying "(as in mouse)" does no good because it's only half of the shift pair, if you're going to give recognizable examples make sure they are unambiguous and that you do so for both sides. --belg4mit 18.124.2.224 18:43, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm not very knowledgable about the GVS, but I would love to improve the article. What would the other half be? Could you tell me how it could be ambiguous, please? --Kjoonlee 18:51, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

As someone unfamiliar with the phonetic symbolism and jargon employed in this article, I gained nothing from it. As users of modern english, typical readers such as myself know the sound of "a" in day or make. Please indicate the sound of both the middle english and modern pronunciations in modern words that we know. In that regard, the current article only gives us examples of sounds that we already know by telling us that "a" is now pronounced like the "a" in cake, without telling us how it was pronounced in middle english.
 * Well, you already know the "a" in "ah", "e" in "bet", "i" in "bit", "u" in "book". Just lengthen those sounds and you'll be pretty close. I'll see what I can do to make that a bit more obvious.. --Kjoonlee 17:21, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
 * This is unhelpful to someone not trained in linguistics. I don't understand what it means to "lengthen" a sound. Examples corresponding to pronunciations both before and after the shift would drastically improve the accessibility of this article. Please note that only a tiny fraction of the people who can't decode IPA will actually bother to edit the talk page; I'm sure that many people simply give up without understanding the article.Btwied (talk) 15:57, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Agreed, the article is almost useless because [e:] style notation is, for most readers, a meaningless foreign language accessible only to linguists who probably already know this stuff. The entire article needs to be rewritten using unambiguous examples, and all of the bracketed notation needs to be relegated to parentheticals for the few cognoscenti in the audience who desire the professional precision that can only be delivered by impenetrable jargon. Jeffryfisher (talk) 00:09, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

How was this discovered?
There's much talk about why the shift occured, but none on how we today became aware of it. Was it by studying rhyme schemes of old poems? Staecker 12:53, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
 * For one thing the spelling didn't change, so words like "wine" or "house" are still spelled with the old vowels, but pronounced differently. This can easily be confirmed by looking at other languages related to English which mostly still have the old vowels. --Chlämens 10:43, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree with the OP: the article seems to take on faith that this Great Vowel Shift happened. How do we know?  Shouldn't there be at least one sentence explaining how we know it happened?50.49.134.141 (talk) 17:14, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Believe or not, some stages of the vowel shift were recorded. In a e-lecture I saw on YouTube, the speaker, a man by the name of Jürgen Handke, says that the diphthongization of /i/ and /u/ was recorded by John Hart in 1570 (5:32).  So, at least to provide minor satisfaction, we know for sure that this stage actually did happen.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.102.216.186 (talk) 02:44, 27 October 2016 (UTC)

Icelandic?
German, Icelandic, and Dutch also experienced sound changes resembling the first stage of the Great Vowel Shift Icelandic? Although I'm not a linguist, I dont think so. It can be seen using the very examples in this page. In German and Dutch, "ice" is Eis and ijs, with. But in Icelandic is ís, with long i. "House" in German and Dutch is haus and huis with the diphthong. In Icelandic is hús, with long u. Something is wrong. Ciacchi 19:40, 30 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Well, the statement "Icelandic also experienced sound changes resembling the first stage of the Great Vowel Shift" is true in that some long vowels were diphthongised, so [a:] → [au], [e:] → [ie], [o:] → [ou] (not very accurate IPA here, I'm afraid). For [i] and [u], the short variants had already drifted towards the centre, so the long variants remained in place. After this shift, the length of the vowels became determined by the surrounding consonants. This also explains the use of the acute accent in Icelandic orthography. So the first sentence applies to Icelandic but the following explanation concerning [i:] does not. Stefán Ingi 14:02, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Perharps we should give some examples that show it better. The problem is, which examples? The article says nothing about the English diphthong, as in here (. Where does it come from? Could it be compared to Icelandic hér and German hier ? Is there any relation? How come Icelandic had it's á lengthened to  and other Germanic languages didn't? For example, Icelandic has já pronounced as /jau/. German, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish have ja pronounced as /ja/. Perharps the modifications in Icelandic had another origin? Icelandic had vowel changings, but they didn't match the vowel changings of other Germanic languages. Ciacchi 17:07, 31 July 2006 (UTC)


 * Oh, I found something about it: Modern English came from Middle English  before r. But I don't believe there's a relation to Icelandic. Ciacchi 21:26, 2 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Icelandic já vs Mainland Scandinavian ja doesn't say much here since it's a special case, an exception. All scandinavian dialects have experienced a Great Vowel Shift, and often the result has been a diphthong. Let's take Dalecarlian (Dal.) as an example. Old Norse (ON) á first shifted into . (This happened in all scandinavian languages and is responsible for the invention of the special Mainland Scandinavian letter å.) This made ON ó  getting shifted to, pushing ON ú  to  and pulling ON á to . Later, ó became diphthongized to . Simultaneously, ON ú turned into  and then . It also happened that ON é  became , ON í  became , ON ý  became  >  > , ON œ  became . Furthermore, ON primary diphtong ei  became the monophthong  which got diphthongized to . Let us summarise by looking at specific examples: ON ár  'year' > Dal. , ON kné  'knee' > Dal. , ON bíta  'to bite' > Dal. , ON sól  'sun' > Dal. , ON hús  'house' > Dal. , ON hýsa  'to house' > Dal. , ON mœta  'to meet' > Dal. , ON stein  'stone' > Early Modern Dal.  > Dal. . Also e.g. Gutnish had a similar extensive diphthong system as a result of the vowel shift process. To some extent, also Central Swedish (on which Standard Swedish is based) had diphthongs as a result. For example, ON á  is today a "subtle" diphthong  in Central Swedish (CS). Similarly, ON ú  > CS , ON ó  > CS  etc. All ON long vowels are "subtle" diphthongs in the most dominant pronunciation standard for Modern Swedish. // Jens Persson (130.242.128.85 02:06, 4 September 2006 (UTC))
 * I doubt that most Scandinavian languages experienced a great vowel shift. Using standard Central Swedish and Norwegian Bokmål for comparision instead of the mre distinct Dalecarlian, I'd say the vowel shift was relatively minor (except for perhaps Danish). 惑乱 分からん 09:08, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Well, secondary dipthongs were formed in many dialects in Sweden, it's just that Standard Swedish has only adopted the subtle Central Swedish version of it. In any case, all Scandinavian dialects - including those that have defined Standard Swedish and "Standard Norwegian" - experienced some kind of major major vowel shift. It's supposed to have been triggered in the west by á [ɑ:] becoming rounded and closed to [ɔ:]. // JP (81.226.216.250 (talk) 18:42, 7 June 2009 (UTC))

That's my point – Scandinavian languages suffered a different Vowel Shift. Not a Great one, like English. Probably it was a different process that was further developed in English. I mean, it affected Scandinavian languages to a certain extent and finished it's work in German and English. --Ciacchi 17:38, 5 November 2006 (UTC)
 * "To a certain extent" is correct. Danish has had a very English-like vowel shift for the vowels a and e (for a good example, go to Google Translate and listen to how the Danish robot pronounces skandinaviske). I don't think it's at all surprising that the first researcher into this phenomenon was Danish, wondering why his language and English messed up the name of the letter A. But in Danish, i apparently didn't change, so long e has converged with long i (as has a with æ, for that matter). Swedish has had one similar to that which affected o and u, although different in its details (stor is pronounced as if spelled like English stoor). BGManofID (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 06:06, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Alternate term - Tudor Vowel Shift?
When I learned about this particular vowel shift, my source referred to is as the Tudor Vowel Shift. What's the history of this term, anyone?


 * It seems that this is an older term. For one, the term Great Vowel Shift wasn't coined until the 18th century.  For another, I don't know the British monarchy well enough to say when the Tudors came into power.  However, I do know that the Tudors were in charge at the early stages of the Great Vowel Shift.  If the Tudors came into power, just before the Great Vowel Shift began, then the term Tudor Vowel Shift would make sense.  Otherwise, I have no idea.  I am sorry, sir/ma'am that I can't give too detailed a description.  This is all I have.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.102.216.186 (talk) 02:53, 27 October 2016 (UTC)

Jespersen's role
Jespersen hardly "discovered" the English Vowel Shift; his 1909 A Modern English Grammar (Vol. I) quotes Luick (Untersuchungen zur englischen Lautgeschichte "investigations into the history of English sounds", 1896) in his discussion of theories of what happened first in a chain of events. And there had been elaborate histories of English pronunciation reaching back to the middle of the 19th cent., including Henry Sweet's [he who was supposedly the model for Shaw's Henry Higgins in "Pygmalion"] 1888 History of English Sounds. But Jespersen seems to have been the first to dub it "great'. I may adjust the language in the article Alsihler 15:15, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

More clear examples
Somebody please ad a few more clear example words for those of us who are not familiar with the phonetic symbols. One key change that is not clear is when the a in "cat", and "hat" was invented, how those words were pronounced before. ted@tedhuntington.com
 * That is not part of the great vowel shift, see Phonological history of the English language Stefán 18:45, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks. The I page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I says that the short /I/ as in "bill" happened in the Great Vowel Shift, but what about the name Imhotep? Doesn't that use the short /I/ sound?
 * No that page says the long [i:] changed to [ai] during the Great Vowel Shift. The short vowel in bill may have been an for a very long time for all I know. (It is very close to  in any case.) Stefán 21:55, 29 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Interesting I guess there is no info on when the short i in "bill" evolved. TedHuntington 22:19, 29 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Stefán's point is that the short i in bill hasn't evolved very much. It's been approximately the same sound probably since proto-Germanic times at least. Today, however, it's undergoing some severe backing in New Zealand English. AJD 22:54, 29 March 2007 (UTC)


 * I have moved this question to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:I since I am interested in the evolution of the short i sound in words such as dill. thanks all! TedHuntington 23:19, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Vocoid
I just turned 'Vocoids' in the last paragraph into a link. I hope it is helpfull.Vijeth 14:36, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

/eI/ sound in "beta" may be earlier
Arabic speaking people pronounce the word Bayt (house), the origin of the letter B all the way back to Akkadian, as the /eI/, what I would type as "BAT" (rhymes with mate) in my phonetic alphabet. So as an aside, I think the /eI/ in ape was in use long before this vowel shift. Maybe this is irrelevent, as it probably was not used by English speakers unless they had to say "beta", for example those who may have read Greek. TedHuntington 15:54, 14 June 2007 (UTC)


 * That is indeed irrelevant; this article is about a change in English phonology. It's not claiming that human vocal tracts suddenly changed to create new vowels that were previously impossible. :-) —RuakhTALK 16:57, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

The diagram
I like the idea of having a diagram like that. However, it appears to be a strange mish-mash of IPA and... some sort of other representation scheme. I'd remake the table in IPA, but I don't think I'd be able to sort out what characters go where. Any takers? Strad 04:30, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Indeed it is - it is the diagram I got in my student days, and it it should be brought into the modern phonetical alphabet. Problem is: I teach literature of that period (that is why I put it there, so that my students find it where they will look for it...) yet I am not a linguist who will do the job properly. I'd be happy if someone updated the thing using some sort picture publisher to replace the letters. --Olaf Simons 07:45, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Examples in the field?
Could one have more examples of actual soundings shown through surviving texts? I don't have Iona and Peter Opie's writings before me, but they claim the rhyme from this couplet dates it as prior to the vowel shift. "She went to the joiner's to buy him a coffin;/ When she got back, the dog was a-laughing." (I'm copying this verse from your article, "Old Mother Hubbard.") I imagine there are other poor souls like me, to whom charts and the international phonetic alphabet mean nothing. Pittsburgh Poet 00:52, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Several centuries ago there was significant variation in the area of "low vowels" in English. At least some of this variation must have been due to different developments in different dialect-areas. That is naturally to be expected -- language is always changing, and if two "strains" or traditions are out of contact with each other, there's no reason why they should experience the same changes. For us modern-day folks, the important thing is that words tend to get borrowed sometimes from one dialect area to another. This can result in doublets, for example we have the noun "tan" but the adjective "tawny" -- both derived from the same Middle English origin. - If you look at the personal correspondence written by the Paston family, you will find a lot of variation such as "dance" being written sometimes as "dance", other times as "daunce". Even in modern English we have "stanch" and then "staunch" pronounced either with the vowel of "father" or with the vowel of "law" (my sympathies to those readers who, due to their dialect, do not know the difference!)- all three pronunciations meaning the same, as in "staunch the wound". - The rime between "coffin" and "laughin'" (centuries ago few people said -ing) may be due to both being pronounced with the vowel of "law" (after all, the "au" in "laugh" must have represented something other than its present "short A" (as in taffy") or "lengthened A" (as in "father")). Or they both may have had the British "short-O" (as in "Tom") pronunciation -- or they may have just been close, not really an exact rime.To read more about this, I recommend books such as Strang's "A History of English", Wyld's "A History of Modern Colloquial English" and Dobson's "English Pronunciation 1500-1700".

p.s. The words "coffin" and "laugh" have, historically speaking, short vowels, thus they were not directly affected by the Great Vowel Shift.Jakob37 (talk) 05:17, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

modern theories
This article AND its talk page are surprisingly lacking in discussions about developments within the last ten or fifteen years. For example, Jeremy Smith's "An Historical Study of English" p.98-108 not only has some useful charts on the northern vowel shifts (Scottish etc.) but also an extensive discussion of competing vowel systems in southern England and the social and phonological interactions between Londoners and "Easterners" and "the Mopsae" --- these interactions being offered as a possible driving force toward initiating the Great Vowel Shift. As for the North, A.J.Aitken's "Older Scottish Vowels" (or other spin-offs by Caroline Macafee) would be the place to find details.Jakob37 (talk) 05:40, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Scotland
It would be very valuable if someone who really knows this would write up a section on Scotland. The brief remark that the effects in Scotland were different is not enough. --Doric Loon (talk) 08:16, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
 * See my bibliographical suggestions below ("modern theories").Jakob37 (talk) 08:23, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

In EME, was long 'e' (mete) like (meat) or like  (meet)?
In all materials I've been able to find, great attention has been paid to the development of ea (meat) and ee  (meet), but long e (mete) has been completely neglected from mention, and I don't know whether long e sounded like ea  or ee. This ambiguity does not exist per se for long o and oa, which were both. Unlike ea and ee, the pronunciations of oa  and oo  haven't merged and the value of long o was clearly. - Gilgamesh (talk) 07:33, 24 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Good question. At least alternate spellings like compleat or lede suggest ... -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 11:14, 24 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Thank you. If verifiable, that's helpful. - Gilgamesh (talk) 03:53, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Theories
One the paragraphs is rubbish (the one beginning, "The effects of the shift were..."), perhaps there should be a theories section of some sorts... needs proper editing by someone who can write better than me...

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 88.109.114.102 (talk • contribs).
 * Totally agree the article needs a few paragraphs discussing theories. This is one of the most dramatic sets of pronunciation changes in historical times, and it's not enough to say that "it happened because of social mobility after the Black Death" as if people just started talking in new ways out of the blue. Functional changes within the phonetic system of English seem likely and have been discussed a good deal among linguists, for examnple in terms of chain shift - one vowel becoming unstable, moving ad then triggering a series of changes in the rest.


 * Another useful point is that during the 13th-14th centuries some final phonemes like e in rhyme and shoe and w in know went silent, at least in the south. Already by 1400, English had become one of the most mono-/disyllabic European languages and this increased the need for powerful, distinct vowel sounds that didn't go too close to each other. But since English is a stress-based langauge it may have seemed hard to keep up long, tonally distinct vowels everywhere - we all know English tends to crowd vowels to the centre. So diphtongization became a way to give the vowels more edge and profile within a stressed scheme. /Strausszek (talk) 04:20, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Recent diphthongisations
In British English in Southern England, it is mentioned that there is a further phonetical diphthongisation in that accent:

diphthongal realization of /iː/ and /uː/, for example beat [ˈbɪit], boot [ˈbʊʉt]

and in Cockney, similar diphthongisations are mentioned (among other vowel shifts) that go even further (for example /iː/ → [əi~ɐi] and /uː/ → [əʉ]). These happen to be strongly reminiscent of the early stages of the Great Vowel Shift, and I cannot think of other contemporary Germanic languages with such a diphthongal pronunciation of the long high vowels /iː/ and /uː/ currently.

Perhaps it would be instructive for the reader to point this out, as it shows that vowel shifts are ongoing and it is not inconceivable that something similar to the Great Vowel Shift could happen again in English (even despite the forces of standardisation). At least in the south of England, there seems to be a strong tendency towards the formation of diphthongs, especially towards closing, falling diphthongs. Florian Blaschke (talk) 03:46, 11 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Happen again? I've had the distinct impression that the Great Vowel Shift never stopped. - Gilgamesh (talk) 10:47, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Most sections unreferenced
Although there are a dozen references listed in the "References" section, there are only three notes in the "Notes" section. Only the opening paragraph and the "Effects" section have any citations at all, and the "Effects" section has only one. Shouldn't just about every sentence (except those restating well-known facts) have at least one citation? For example: The "History" section talks about how the Black Death may have indirectly caused the Great Vowel Shift. It does not provide citations of two secondary sources that support that theory. Wouldn't we want the titles of two sources and the names of two authors? And, preferably, the publication dates? --Eldin raigmore (talk) 19:30, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

Disagreement concerning the dates of the Great Vowel Shift
This page currently states: "The Great Vowel Shift was a major change in the pronunciation of the English language that took place in Southern England between 1450 and 1750.[1] The Great Vowel Shift was first studied by Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), a Danish linguist and Anglicist, who coined the term.[2]"

The Geoffrey Chaucer page at Harvard states: "Beginning in the twelfth century and continuing until the eighteenth century (but with its main effects in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries) the sounds of the long stressed vowels in English changed their places of articulation (i.e., how the sounds are made)." 

Reference.com states: "The Great Vowel Shift was a major change in the pronunciation of the English language that took place in the south of England between 1200 and 1600. The Great Vowel Shift was first studied by Otto Jespersen ( 1860– 1943), a Danish linguist and Anglicist, who coined the term." 

Melinda Menzer of Furman University states "The Great Vowel Shift was a massive sound change affecting the long vowels of English during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries"

All the sites agree on the author of the term, but none agree on the dates. Of them all, Wikipedia presumes the greatest precision (3 significant figures of precision), and does not present the breadth of disagreement on the subject. Facing this latitude of disagreement among experts, Wikipedia should be more circumspect. After I did the research, I felt that I had been misinformed by the Wiki. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.46.146.229 (talk) 07:16, 28 March 2011 (UTC)


 * The dates and rate of these changes are still under lively discussion in the linguistic scholarly community. See for instance Roger Lass, Historical Linguistics and Language Change, Cambridge University press 1997, p.36-40 and 289-90, On Explaining Language Change also by Lass, 1980, and articles by Lass and R.P. Stockwell & D. Minkova in Kastovsky & Bauer, ed., Luick Revisited (1988: a volume of conference proceedings from a 1985 colloquy on historical linguistics - full ref. in Lass 1997). Stock well and Minkova argue an early date for the shift downwards of i and u ( bit, put) from long, often stressed vowels to centralized, weak and very short, beginning already before 1300, and this is the old-school dating of that particular change, according to Lass, so it has numerous proponents but has never ruled unchallenged. Lass on the other hand, who is also eminently recognized in this field, says those changes would have begun no earlier than the mid-seventeenth century, so the difference here is more than 350 years.


 * Moreover, Stockwell and Minkova argue that the Great Vowel Shift should not be discussed as a unity; it wasn't a unified phenomenon at all (Lass 1997, p.40). Lass thinks it was essentially unified, though it didn't necessarily have a single or single-direction cause (and goes for moderately  functionalist explanations). On the whole he lands in the lower half of the range of differing time-spans: he locates it mostly in the 15th to early 18th century, about the same span as Menzer. I don't think these people. or their pupils, have got much closer in the last ten years. There are issues in all sciences where no definite consensus exists and I think Wikipedia should reflect this, but in a reasonable way, not by presenting every theory that's been introduced by at least one scholar as equally true but by showing the most important ones and trying to explain how these theories differ.Strausszek (talk) 23:19, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

Meet-meat merger too early on timeline
Samuel Johnson in his grammar appendix to his 1755 dictionary clearly distinguishes the meet and meat vowels: "Ea sound like e long, as mean; or like ee, as dear, clear, near. Ei is sounded like e long, as seize, perceiving."

"E long" is apparently /eː/ while ee is /iː/. With this evidence, the meet-meat merger didn't reach its full extent until the late 18th century at the earliest. 75.132.149.255 (talk) 21:39, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Word given example: fate or fat?
Quoting: "the vowel in feet was [eː] (similar to modern fate)" -- wasn't it supposed to be "fat" given as example? The modern feet has the vowel [i:], not [e:]. -- Tiberiu C. Turbureanu
 * I think you're reading it backwards. The vowel in "feet" was indeed [eː], but is now [i:]. "fate" has [eɪ], which is close to the vowel that "feet" used to have. CodeCat (talk) 23:25, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

German

 * "In German [...] long [iː] had changed to [aɪ], (as in Eis, 'ice') and long [uː] to [aʊ] (as in Haus, 'house')"

That sounds like there was a German word written "Haus" (written) and pronounced "Hus" (spoken) which than became Haus (written & spoken). So, was there really a word "Haus" (written) which pronounced "Hus" (spoken) or was the word also written "Hus" or back than "hus" (written) and pronounced that way? en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hus#Old_High_German implies that there was a German word written as "hus". So, didn't in Germany the writing system evolved, too, like "hus" (written & spoken) becoming "haus/Haus" (spoken) and then "Haus" (written & spoken)? - IP, 21:49, 20 May 2014 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.196.250.81 (talk)
 * Yes, that's a bit awkwardly worded. Indeed you are right: Unlike in English, the German diphthongisation is also reflected in the spelling. It also started considerably earlier, already in the late Old High German period (and that is in fact apparently the reason why it is shown in spelling, as the spelling tradition gradually petrified and ceased reflecting new changes in the course of the high medieval period in several languages, as people throughout Europe began to write more frequently in the vernacular), though it was only deep in the Middle High German period that it began to be written more consistently – in those dialects that had it, of course. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 05:54, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

Simple Comparisons.
Could someone please make up a table containing something along the lines of;
 * Word -  Pronunciation Before  -  Pronunciation After

Done for each shift and with layman's phonetic descriptions instead of IPA (or whichever standard is being used here). It'd be much appreciated! tactik 08:04, 13 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, it would be much appreciated! It HASN'T been done. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 211.225.34.187 (talk) 12:02, 10 May 2007 (UTC).
 * Let me also add my request that this be done. I find this subject to be really interesting, but I can't understand examples using IPA.  Using IPA as a standard, or expecting the layman to grasp information using IPA is like the Roman Catholic mass being said in Latin, with the priest facing the altar.  Only the initiates, the priestly caste can really understand what is being said.  The congregation is mytified. JGC1010 (talk) 02:37, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
 * We should certainly try to make things easy for people. But no layman's approximation is ever really good. They are vague, they are ambiguous, and they privilege the speakers of some dialects over others. They are very logical if you come from the same background as the writer, and totally misleading if you don't. My favourite example: when I started learning German I was confused that a textbook told me that Liebe ('love') should be prononced leeber. What was the -r doing on the end?  Years later I discovered that for the English, a terminal -r is silent, so when they see one it signals that the preceding -e- has a schwa sound which approximates to German terminal -e. But I am Scots.  When I see a terminl -r it tells me I have to say /r/. The IPA is easy to learn, it is precise and scientific, if we use it wisely (i.e. don't attempt a narrow transcription when a broad one will do) it is mostly not so very much different from normal writing, and it is definately the way to go. --Doric Loon (talk) 16:34, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

I also strongly suggest this is added. It can't be very hard to do for anyone who understands the symbols. As for the problem of dialect, it should surely be assumed that vowels follow current recieved pronunciation? This article is presumably about the English language in the UK, so anyone reading will no doubt be familiar with English recieved pronunciation? Grand Dizzy (talk) 20:33, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
 * I have to agree with Doric Loon above. Yes, it is a nuisance to have to familiarize yourself with the IPA symbols first, and all too often phoneticians forget how to make things understandable to the vast majority of people out there, but there really is no alternative to using the IPA. Only a tiny fraction of speakers of English use RP, and the majority are probably entirely unfamiliar with it; if we're gonna expect readers to learn Received Pronounciation to understand the article then we might as well expect them to learn the IPA (which is probably easier!). After all, we also expect people to be familiar with basic units of measurement when writing about other topics; we would say that something is a kilo rather than saying that it's about the same weight as a bag of sugar. --Chlämens (talk) 06:25, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

The terrible irony in all of this is that if such great vowel shifts hadn't occurred, monolingual speakers of English wouldn't be whining about using IPA. Finnish (phonemic orthography) and Russian are my native tongues and IPA is easy as hell and I only had to learn a few extra symbols. It's not really THAT important whether it's ɔ or o, the whole point in the vowel shift is that it changed vowels into diphthongs.. don't tell me you can't tell the difference between [u:] and [aʊ]? -- nlitement [talk]  13:46, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Please yes! Not every, and I suspect most, users of Wikipedia are not aware of the sounds associated with the IPA symbols. I certainly am not. Having to refer back and forth to another page (the IPA page) makes the use of this page awkward and more difficult. I found the time/sound graph, a format I would normally have found very illuminating, to be next to worthless because I don't know which sounds to associate with which symbols. The examples that follow are also hobbled by this. They show what the Modern English words are (and so I can "hear" how they sound, at least in my own dialect of English) but there are no examples of the former sound so I have no idea what the current sound evolved from. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.50.6.38 (talk) 00:57, 10 October 2011 (UTC)


 * I can understand English speakers being confused by IPA when they pronounce A as [eː], E as [iː] and I as [aː] in some accents – with seemingly randomly shuffled vowels – but really, it's exactly the Great Vowel Shift why IPA is so confusing to Anglophones. Understanding basic IPA is no big deal to continental Europeans. We have WP:RESPELL but there's no way to render [oː] as in Middle English boote in a respelling system geared to Modern English, where the vowel simply does not exist in most common accents, nor even a reasonably close approximation. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 07:02, 18 July 2014 (UTC)


 * IPA is not difficult, folks. Aside from that nineties edition of the Oxford English dictionary that I constantly looked at in my youth, I had no knowledge of IPA before I became a part of Wikipedia many years ago. Nevertheless, I found it quite easy to learn, and it is far superior to any English respelling system, because it is trans-dialectal and trans-lingual in nature. Furthermore, analogues to the IPA's method of transcription can still be found in English, even now, after the Great Vowel Shift.
 * The words "eight", "freight", "neigh", "great", "yea", "fey" etc. all have the vowel /e:/ (or, more accurately in most dialects, /eɪ/), and they look like they have that vowel too. The words "ha", "father", "ya", "pasta" (in most dialects), "ma", "pa", "mirage" etc. all have the vowel /ɑ/, and they look like they have that vowel too. The words "mi", "ti" "happiness" etc. all have the vowel /i/, and they look like they have that vowel too.
 * As such, I find any whinge that "IPA is too hard" to be ridiculous. Just spend five minutes to learn it, please. Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 15:40, 18 July 2014 (UTC)
 * As such, I find any whinge that "IPA is too hard" to be ridiculous. Just spend five minutes to learn it, please. Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 15:40, 18 July 2014 (UTC)
 * As such, I find any whinge that "IPA is too hard" to be ridiculous. Just spend five minutes to learn it, please. Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 15:40, 18 July 2014 (UTC)


 * True. I blame US dictionaries for cementing idiosyncratic understandings of ā, ē, ī etc. even in pronunciation guides in the minds of millions of Americans. I think it is telling that above, a user calls IPA "[e:] style notation".
 * Anyway, since there are now audio files linked in the text, I expect the complaints to stop. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 01:24, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Simplistic picture
Based on Roger Lass's treatment in the Cambridge History of English, the Great Vowel Shift was a much more complex set of changes. Most cases of Middle English change to diphthongs, and  were raised, but the changes that  underwent were more complex: sometimes they changed to  and sometimes to. Or so I gather. I'm still slightly confused by Lass's portrait because of its complexity, and need to reread it. — Eru·tuon 01:30, 8 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia is meant to be written by and for both experts and nonexperts alike. One of the big issues that we seem to be having with these subjects is that non-linguists are unable to understand what is being said. Now, I personally believe everyone should at least learn IPA if nothing else related to linguistics, but it seems that even with said understanding, a lot of editors are still very confused.


 * You do not know how many times I encounter people on talk pages complaining about this.


 * As such, I frankly think that the current image is sufficient for the purposes that it is being used for. If readers wish for further detail, they can research the subject elsewhere (or perhaps we can make a reference in the notes to further information). Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 01:56, 8 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Perhaps the current image should be kept, but it would be valuable to describe the complexities of EME pronunciation somewhere. The fact that split into  and, combined with later changes, for instance, explains why ea is pronounced in three different ways, as seen in break, bread, east. And the complexity in EME pronunciation of ai explains rhymes in EME poetry. And so on. However, it is best to describe these complexities in such a way that the overall picture of the GVS is not blurred. — Eru·tuon 02:14, 8 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Indeed. Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 03:29, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

Cleanup and rewriting
I'm rewriting the article based on Lass (2000), mainly. The Great Vowel Shift had two main stages, and apparently the meet–meat and great–mate mergers (or whatever they're called) are actually not the Great Vowel Shift, but come from variant pronunciations in the period right after the GVS. The article now explains this a little more clearly. Eventually, I hope to include a few examples of rhymes that show various mergers. That's the main point to understanding the GVS and Early Modern English pronunciation, being able to read poetry in original pronunciation.

I've removed the following content from the article. If you want to add it back, find sources that substantiate it. Probably some of the content came from books and articles in the References section, but I'm not sure which ones. — Eru·tuon 05:21, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Possible causes
Experts in linguistics and cultural history continue to debate possible reasons for the vowel shift.


 * Source given:
 * Does this source give all these theories, or only some? — Eru·tuon 05:40, 9 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Does this source give all these theories, or only some? — Eru·tuon 05:40, 9 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Some theories emphasise the mass migration after the Black Death in the mid-14th century to southeast England, where differences in accents led to some groups modifying their speech to allow for a standard pronunciation of vowel sounds.
 * Another theory posits a sudden social mobility after the Black Death, with people from lower levels in society moving to higher levels (the pandemic also having hit the aristocracy).
 * Another explanation attributes great influence to the language of the ruling class: the medieval aristocracy spoke French, but by the early 15th century they had come to use English. This may have caused a change to the "prestige accent" of English, either by making pronunciation more French in style or by changing it in some other way, perhaps by hypercorrection to something thought of as "more English" (England being at war with France for much of this period). But there is just as much evidence for the hypercorrection to have been "more English" as there is for it to have been "more French" (with French still the slightly favored language of the upper class).
 * Another possible influence, the great political and social upheaval of the 15th century, was largely contemporaneous with the vowel shift.
 * The fact that vowel shifts occurred in other Germanic languages as well may indicate that there was some inherent instability in the English vowels used before the Great Vowel Shift. The change could have occurred spontaneously in one dialect and then spread outwards as others who heard it thought that the diphthongs were less ambiguous than the long vowels they supplanted.

German and Dutch
German and Dutch also experienced sound changes resembling the first stage of the Great Vowel Shift. In German, by the 15th or 16th centuries, long had changed to  (today ), as in Eis, 'ice', and long  to, as in Haus, 'house', though some dialects resist those changes to this day (Alemannic, Limburgish, Ripuarian and most varieties of Lower German). In Dutch, the former became (ijs), and the latter had earlier become, which then became  (huis). In German, there also was a separate, which became , via an intermediate similar to the Dutch. In the Polder Dutch pronunciation, the shift has actually been carried further than in Standard Dutch, with a very similar result as in German and English.

Dutch and German have, like English, also shifted common Germanic to  (German) or  (Dutch), as in Proto-Germanic *fōt- 'foot' > German Fuß, Dutch voet (as well as the rare secondary  to  in German and  in Dutch). However, this similarity turns out to be superficial on closer inspection. Given the huge differences between the structures of Old English vowel phonology on one side, and that of Old Dutch and Old High German on the other, this is hardly surprising. While there is no indication that English long vowels other than did anything but move up in tongue-body position, Dutch  and German  appear to have come about through a process of diphthongization.

In the very earliest longer, connected Old High German and Old Dutch texts of the 9th century, the vowel is already largely written -uo-. That is, it had broken into a nucleus with a centering glide. This complex nucleus smoothed in Middle High German and Middle Dutch, becoming the of Modern German and the  of Modern Dutch around the same time as the long high vowels began to diphthongize.

The of Modern German has a variety of sources, the oldest of which is Proto-Germanic *aw, which smoothed before  (so rot 'red', Ohr 'ear', Floh 'flea', etc.) Elsewhere the sound was written -ou- in Old High German. In Old Dutch, this sound had become -o- everywhere, explaining the difference in words such as Dutch boom and German Baum.

While English has generally kept the original orthography from before the vowel shift, the orthography of German, and to a lesser extent Dutch, has been adjusted so that it corresponds to modern pronunciation. Therefore, pronunciation of German and Dutch words is largely predictable from spelling. As a result, unpredictable pairs (spelling-wise) such as wind vs. find, and meat vs. great vs. threat do not occur.

Norwegian, Swedish and Danish
Norwegian and Swedish also experienced something similar to the Great Vowel Shift in their back vowels, although the results were different. As in early modern English, (spelled å) shifted to, while the long o had chain-shifted to  (in comparison to English "oo"). But instead of diphthonguizing, the older was fronted to. Danish has not undergone these changes in the back vowels, but instead the front vowels have been affected. As in early modern English, long a,, shifted to (short a is now , as in standard English), while long e, , has moved toward , almost clashing with long i.

Origin of ei/ey as [iː]
In words such as key, receive, weird, etc. It would be tempting to assume that this spelling was pre-Shift, and that it merged along with  (pre-Shift ee) to. But is this true? And if so, how long ago did this diphthong change to ? Did it merge with first before they merged to  together? Are there attested time periods these shifts may have taken place? Is there research on the subject? - Gilgamesh (talk) 04:56, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

"Weird" actually disappeared from English English in about 1200, it was reintroduced from Scots after the GVS. The Old English was "wyrd" which would have become a homophone of either "word" or "wired" had it survived to undergo the shift. "Key" (OE caeg) should rhyme with "they" had it developed regularly; it probably joined in with words like "meat" in shifting to i: during the 1600s. Receive developed regularly, the spelling reflects its Old French origin. 2.31.249.160 (talk) 11:58, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

In other languages
I think 1) the 'in other languages' section is written in a poor non-encyclopedic style, 2) is unclear, as Icelandic is mentioned but not in the examples (see also other discussions about it) and has other failures, 3) is about vowel shifts partially comparable to the Great Vowel Shift, but has actually very little to do with it. So I propose we just remove the entire section, or move it to some other page (didn't check if there's a general vowel shift page). Jalwikip 07:51, 20 June 2007 (UTC)


 * The statements on Dutch can certainly be improved. I don't think there has been much vowel shift in Dutch. X10 06:05, 28 June 2007 (UTC)


 * The section may have been poorly-written, but I do think the article should contain mentions of similar vowel-shifting in other languages, such as ī > ei and ū > au in German. I think having it about English-only with a lack of even any links to other articles makes it seem a bit limited IMO. Even limiting it to shifts like the ones that happened to English vowels may be of interest to some people. (Example: Danish a and e, Swedish o and u, Czech ō > ů and ū > ou, the different dialects of Friulian, etc.) BGManofID (talk) 06:16, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

The Recordings are Terrible
Sorry, but they are. The guy who recorded them either pronounces /eː/ as /eɪ/ or something like [i̞ː], where it's very close to /iː/. He pronounces /ei/ and /ɛi/ as /eɪ/ and /ɛɪ/. He pronounces /aɪ/ as [ɜɪ], which I realize is a dialectal feature, but it is unhelpful when the recording should demonstrate the standard pronunciation. He pronounces both /oː/ and /ou/ as /oʊ/. His pronunciation of /ɔu/ sounds a bit off, but I'm not sure. He pronounces /aʊ/ as [æʊ] when it would be much more helpful to pronounce it as written.

Someone who is good at pronouncing vowels and knows how to edit Wikipedia should fix this. It's just embarrassing that these mediocre recordings are allowed to be here. I might have to figure out how to edit it myself. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Smashhoof2 (talk • contribs) 04:44, 21 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Huh, I don't know why I didn't notice your comment before. Anyway, I'm the one who made the recordings. I will consider your comments as addressed to me. It's disappointing my pronunciation appears mediocre to you. I thought it was a good effort. I could re-record if I think you have good points, or you can record if you're better at it than me, and have a good microphone.


 * My pronunciation of is basically as in German. German long e sounds a lot like English  to me, but that's because their long i is very close. Perhaps I said the vowel one hair too close, as  rather than, but it doesn't sound like that to me.


 * I think you're right that the diphthongs don't have fully close endings, and that was not quite monophthongal (not enough like German). Those are small errors, so I'm not sure if I care to correct them.


 * My pronunciation is influenced by Canadian raising, so bite certainly is not literally phonetically . But it's not non-standard. Canadian raising of bite is a feature of General American, though not of Received Pronunciation, or the standard Englishes of Australia and New Zealand. I was not attempting to be literally phonetically accurate in the modern pronunciations, because modern pronunciation is not quite accurately described by the traditional IPA system used on Wikipedia.


 * I'm not sure about out. I don't think it starts with near-open front, but I could be wrong. It sounds rather like the recording of US English out on Wiktionary, and that's what I was aiming for.


 * I don't really feel like re-recording at this point. If you want, you can record the soundfiles with a microphone and Audacity, and upload your own versions, though I reserve the right to criticize your pronunciation in turn. ;-) — Eru·tuon 07:43, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Problems with section on Northern and Scots English
Currently, in the section "Northern English and Scots," it says that the vowel in boot was shifted from /oː/ to /øː/ during the Middle English period. Then, it also says, during and the Great Vowel Shift, it was from /øː/ to /yː/, and later unrounded to /iː/. However, the Middle English vowel /eː/ in meet also shifted to /iː/. So, in theory, wouldn't there be a meet-boot merger? The article fails to speak of any such merger. So, naturally, I need some clarity. Thank you.74.102.216.186 (talk) 02:59, 30 November 2016 (UTC)
 * You should help if you can.-- Sıgehelmus  (Talk) &#124;д=)  03:34, 30 November 2016 (UTC)


 * I won't look into this now. I think there probably has been what could be called a meet–boot merger. But unrounding of to  might have happened after the time of the Great Vowel Shift. I don't recall, from when I read the source, whether it gave a name to the post-GVS merger. — Eru·tuon 06:03, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

The earliest evidence?
I think the curious poem by Ieuan ap Hywel Swrdwal written in English using Welsh spelling is actually of interest in dating the GVS. Written in Oxford around 1470, it is written thus:

O michti ladi, owr leding tw haf, At hefn owr abeiding, yntw ddy ffest efrlesting, i set a braents ws tw bring

w represents /u:/, but it is used for to (ME /to:/) and not our (ME /u:r/) which is spelt owr, which must represent a diphthong. ddy(the) is surely /ði:/ not ME /ðe:/. The most obvious one is abeiding, which clearly indicates something like /ei/ or /əi/. Only /a:/ (ladi) has definitely not shifted.

The pronunciation he denotes seems to be something like:



That's definitely Early Modern English. Walshie79 (talk) 17:10, 21 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Very interesting. In addition to ladi, leding (leading) also might not have its vowel shifted, since it could represent (shifted) or  (unshifted). My recollection is that Welsh didn't or doesn't have a contrast between open-mid and close-mid vowels. — Eru·tuon 05:00, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

Did it affect both Anglo-Saxon and Norman words in Middle English?
The examples used to illustrate the pronunciation changes bite, meet, meat, mate, out, boot, boat, time, see, east, fox... cut are almost all of Old English rather than Norman French origin. Did the vowel shift also affect Norman-origin words in Middle English?CharlesHBennett (talk) 06:20, 20 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Yes. AJD (talk) 08:33, 20 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Sound changes are always indifferent to word origin. They are purely phonological. CodeCat (talk) 19:33, 20 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Possible example: "author." Wiktionary (although not a "reference-able" source per se) says that the word is derived from Anglo-Norman, which came from Old French "autor," which came from the Latin word "auctor."  I don't know French phonology well, but I do know Latin.  The Latin spelling is very phonetic.  How the Latin word is spelt, it would be pronounced .  Therefore, the specific pronunciation of the "au" in Modern English word "author" is probably the result of the Great Vowel Shift.LakeKayak (talk) 20:46, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Error in the image
The image is helpful. However, it seems to have some errors, specifically involving what is apart of the GVS and what isn't. In particular, the fronting of ModE  didn't occur until the mid-twentieth century, and is not apart of the Shift at all. Can we possibly fix this?LakeKayak (talk) 19:40, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

Phonemic representation vs. phoneme
I initially only changed the slashes to brackets because someone seemed to be a little confused, using {{IPAc-en| for the IPA symbols. Also, a phoneme is defined as "one of the units of sound that distinguish one word from another in a particular language". If we go by this definition, then I think that most of the so-called phonemes on the page would be considered phonetic realizations. Either way, we should attempt to make ourselves clear, so that nobody mistakenly uses {{IPAc-en| again.LakeKayak (talk) 01:56, 15 April 2017 (UTC)
 * I misspoke. The issue is the difference between a phoneme and an allophone (a specific variation of a phoneme).  During the Great Vowel Shift, the general phonemes did not change with some exceptions like father, great, and soup.  However, how the phonemes were pronounced, the allophones, changed.LakeKayak (talk) 15:23, 17 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Oops, I didn't respond. I guess I was focusing on Wiktionary at the time. I just changed all the transcriptions back to phonemic. I think there may be some cases that are best marked as phonetic, but most are probably phonemic.
 * It is true that the GVS probably didn't change the number of phonemes, but that doesn't mean that it is accurate to use the same phonemic symbols before and after the GVS. The choice of phonemic symbols should always be determined by the relationships of the phonemes to each other, their relative height and backness. The symbols represent an idealized representation of these relationships: for instance, {{IPA|$⟨e⟩$}} is used in transcribing a mid front vowel phoneme that is higher than one transcribed using {{IPA|$⟨ɛ⟩$}}. However, I'm not totally sure that all the transcriptions are based on that sort of analysis, especially the ones showing the change in the vowel height of the first elements of the diphthongs of bite and out. — Eru·tuon 17:34, 19 May 2017 (UTC)
 * To phrase this another way: when the Middle English phoneme {{IPA|/iː/}} shifted to be pronounced as a diphthong, it would probably be incorrect to still transcribe it phonemically as {{IPA|/iː/}}; we would have to write it using some sort of representation of this diphthong. I'm not sure, though, if every change in the pronunciation of the first element of the diphthong ({{IPA|ei}} &rarr; {{IPA|ɛi}} &rarr; {{IPA|əi}}, or whatever) should be represented in the phonemic transcription or not. I'd rather err on the side of representing it as phonemic, for now. — Eru·tuon 17:56, 19 May 2017 (UTC)
 * I actually know who out of all people can help us out: Mr KEBAB. I'll contact him now.LakeKayak (talk) 18:07, 19 May 2017 (UTC)
 * {{replyto|LakeKayak}} You need to specify what you need my help with. I'm not sure what you need. Mr KEBAB (talk) 19:04, 20 May 2017 (UTC)
 * {{ping|Mr KEBAB}} Here is a sentence I found on the page.
 * "The changes are known as the Great Vowel Shift. They occurred over several centuries and can be divided into two phases. The first phase affected the close vowels /iː uː/ and the close-mid vowels /eː oː/: /eː oː/ were raised to /iː uː/, and /iː uː/ became the diphthongs /ei ou/ or /əi əu/."
 * I was under the impression that "ei" and "ou" or "əi" or "əi" and "əu" should be in brackets are they represent the specific pronunciation used at that stage of the vowel shift. Is this assessment accurate?LakeKayak (talk) 14:22, 21 May 2017 (UTC)
 * {{replyto|LakeKayak}} I'd leave the slashes because the exact phonetic value is unknown, so both transcriptions are acceptable as phonemic. The sentence you quoted looks good as it is. Mr KEBAB (talk) 14:33, 21 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Okay. Thank you.LakeKayak (talk) 14:43, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

re "Exceptions"
As far as I know, most specialists would say that "father" still had a short vowel at the time of the Great Vowel Shift, so "failed to become [ɛː] " is not really appropriate. The mystery remains as to why it lengthened later. Also, the examples in the following paragraph such as "book, good" etc. show "irregular" developments that only happened AFTER the GVS, so they are also not exceptions to the GVS.Jakob37 (talk) 08:22, 5 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Recordings made by a German linguist of the speech of British POWs during the First World War show that many of them pronounced 'father' as 'faither'. So is it possible that it did become [ɛː]? At any rate, that particular sentence seems wrong.

12:51, 8 June 2017 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 103.26.195.37 (talk)

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/ɪ/ evolution
Any specifics on the /ɪ/ or vowel? It doesn't appear on the GVS chart. Thanks. Wolfdog (talk) 21:00, 23 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Didn't the original vowel fail to raise alongside ? The only thing I can think of are vowels in words like wanted and orange that originally had  and . The first one was raised to, the second one was raised to  then maybe diphthongized to  and then finally reduced to . There are also words like honey, in which the original  (or whatever it was,  or something else) was reduced to . That's one source of the contemporary  vowel. There's probably not much more to it. Mr KEBAB (talk) 22:52, 23 October 2017 (UTC)
 * What I mean is, in a word like, we know the change went from (Middle English, I believe) to  (Modern English). But when exactly (or as "exactly"as we can get) did the transition take place? Which option would Shakespeare, for example, have used? Wolfdog (talk) 22:58, 23 October 2017 (UTC)
 * You can only speculate, as it's a phonetic detail. There could've been a considerable free variation in height from close to close-mid, as it is the case in contemporary BrE. Even contemporary RP is not fully consistent in that regard - older speakers use a kind of a mid-centralized cardinal, whereas younger speakers use a noticeably lower vowel, similar to a centralized cardinal . The difference is striking in unstressed syllables, in which younger speakers use an even more central vowel.


 * See also Phonological history of English high front vowels. In short, nobody knows. Mr KEBAB (talk) 23:06, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

Why did it happen?
There seems to me to be a paucity of information provided in the article as to the possible reasons/driving forces behind the Shift. Someone with more knowledge on the subject needs to correct this lack of valuable information. ZFT (talk) 06:15, 1 January 2016 (UTC)


 * It seems that the information was removed from the page due to lack of supporting evidence. If you wish for it to be reinstated, we would need evidence from a scholarly source.  I am sorry.  It is what it is.LakeKayak (talk) 00:39, 3 January 2017 (UTC)


 * In that case the page should at least make it clear that nobody really knows why! Equinox ◑ 01:09, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

Hodges?
Who is "Hodges," before whom testimony was given in 1644? 100.36.39.75 (talk) 14:04, 19 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Maybe Richard Hodges, a Southwark schoolmaster? https://books.google.com.au/books?id=lV4o4rA2K14C&pg=PA64&lpg=PA64&dq=Hodges+1644 huwg 119.225.7.134 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 00:14, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

Other languages
Maybe there should be a note or disambiguation or additional subsection to cover other languages in which a GVS may also have occurred. For instance, Sohn (1999) reports on claims of a "Great Vowel Shift" in Middle Korean. —DIV (1.144.105.189 (talk) 13:19, 25 April 2019 (UTC))

Understandability
I'd like this article to be understandable to non-linguists. If anyone's paying attention to the page, please comment if you have trouble understanding anything. I think someone suggested adding soundfiles; I might do that. — Eru·tuon 03:32, 10 April 2015 (UTC)
 * The sound files help, but they conflict with the "timeline" image further down the page. Also, I don't think that they should be separated; both should be kept together. CodeCat (talk) 19:16, 10 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, there are several differences between Lass's view of the GVS and the one shown in the timeline. There are also some errors in the timeline (see how stone, know, and law merge in pronunciation around 1750). I moved it down because it shows more than just the GVS. I think we need a new version, preferably that shows only the vowels that underwent the GVS and later changes (ME long vowels and, maybe too), has errors corrected, and that shows Lass's view of diphthongization, the one in the table that I added. But the article needs to show the alternative theories about diphthongization more clearly, since many people will encounter the theory Lass says is incorrect (where  develop into a diphthong with schwa quite early on). — Eru·tuon 21:44, 10 April 2015 (UTC)
 * The one with schwa is what I learned myself, so I was a bit puzzled by your pronunciations because of that. In any case, I found the timeline image very useful and informative myself, so I would be sad to see it go. CodeCat (talk) 22:32, 10 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Yeah, the way the timeline presents things is nice, showing mergers with converging lines and so on. I wouldn't remove it entirely (I just moved it back up in the article again), and we should actually have more diagrams like that, because good pictures make things clearer. Lass has some diagrams of the Great Vowel Shift as a whole and of individual parts of the shift and later changes. I'll see if I can figure out Inkscape enough to create some SVG versions for this article. Might take a while. — Eru·tuon 00:46, 11 April 2015 (UTC)
 * The difficulty with the edits you made is that it makes it hard to account for day and die not being homophones today. If long /iː/ passed through a stage like /ɛi/ as you say, then they must surely have merged. CodeCat (talk) 12:23, 28 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Hmm, I never responded to your comment. I just took a look at Roger Lass, whose treatment I based my edits on. He doesn't explicitly say why they didn't merge. The topics of day and die don't quite intercept in his treatment. He first discusses the shift of Middle English to  and, then discusses the various mergers affecting  (daze, seas, days) in the 1600s or so. But I can try to interpolate.


 * He analyzes Middle English day as, and ME die presumably as . From there, day became or , while die became  and . (The vowels of day, daze, and seas had various pronunciations in the 1600s, resulting in different rhymes depending on the poem.) I think the closest day and die would come to merging under his analysis is when day was  and die was . Though that's pretty close, it isn't quite close enough for them to merge. — Eru·tuon 08:53, 21 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Tooltips for the IPA symbols would help a lot. BlackmailedIntoRegistering (talk) 02:49, 28 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Tooltips saying what? Open front vowel, etc.? — Eru·tuon 03:02, 28 April 2015 (UTC)
 * On many pages with pronunciation instructions, pronunciation tooltips appear when you hover over the individual IPA symbols. For example: Sault_Ste._Marie,_Ontario. Such symbols would be helpful, here. Presently, when you hover over any symbol, you just get a generic tooltip: "representation in the IPA..." I self-assess my linguistic understanding as "dabbler", so, apologies if this is not the same thing/not applicable. BlackmailedIntoRegistering (talk) 04:20, 28 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Oh yeah. In some cases that would be difficult, because some vowel sounds (long vowels or diphthongs) that occurred in stages of the Great Vowel Shift don't exist in Modern English. I'll have to look at the page and think about it. — Eru·tuon 04:45, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

"English spelling began to become standardized in the 15th and 16th centuries" seems off to me. The phrase "began to become" is a bit awkward. I suggest changing it to "Documents like dictionaries and English spelling manuals became increasingly popular in the..." or something with historical accuracy. DancingGrumpyCat (talk) 04:30, 20 December 2019 (UTC)
 * True, but I'd definitely continue to include the word "standardized" in there. Wolfdog (talk) 19:18, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

Middle English section
The Middle English section needs more sources. SunCrow (talk) 09:12, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

Suggestion
How do we know how English words were pronounced hundreds of years ago? I think this article would benefit from a short explanation of this question. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.152.168.247 (talk) 00:28, 28 November 2008 (UTC)
 * We know it


 * thanks to rhyme
 * thanks to orthography used in former times according to European conventions as transcriptions of what one heard
 * thanks to the pattern of European languages which all developed according to rules - it's Appel [uppel] in lower (i.e. north-) German dialects, Apfel [upfel] in high German, it was appel [uppel] in middle English accordingly - otherwise the whole system of transformations will break... --Olaf Simons (talk) 10:46, 28 November 2008 (UTC)


 * That would be more like [appl], [apfl] and [appl] – I assume you tried to use IPA, as you used square brackets?
 * Anyway, I wanted to mention that for the 17th and 18th centuries, there are direct descriptions as well, books which describe the "proper" standard pronunciation, which is already mentioned in the article, but only in the section "Other languages". --Florian Blaschke (talk) 03:29, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

This is quite interesting and really should be put into the article, no the talk section. Can one of the editors please take this response and integrate it into the main article as a section (or perhaps another article). Thanks kindly! 12:56, 5 December 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jimlear (talk • contribs)

Eight years later: this still is an obvious question, and the article would be better were it to include an answer. -- Dan Griscom (talk) 15:20, 15 April 2021 (UTC)