The Great Vowel Shift
November 6, 2014 – 4:37 pm
Over the course of several centuries beginning in the early 15th (probably) in the South of England (probably) there were a series of regular unconditioned (= not affected by their phonetic environment) vowel changes that affected the long vowels of ME. Those vowels were raised – or if they were already high they diphthongized. The reasons are quite unknown: in fact, it isn’t even agreed that the changes are a push or drag chain – ie. whether a rise in low vowels caused higher vowels to be moved further up to avoid clashing, or whether a change in higher vowels left spaces to be filled by lower vowels being raised. We do note that that something similar happened in some other Germanic languages, so perhaps it is due to an instability in the Germanic stress or accentual systems.
In any case, I thought it would be interesting to record the changes in pictorial form here. (The diagram doesn’t indicate the period or duration of the changes.)
