This came up on a thread the other day and I just can’t get my head around what happened and why. I can’t read IPA which obviously isn’t helping my reading
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This is going to require you to sit at your desk or in front of your phone and make silly noises to yourself. Have fun!
First, try saying some vowels out loud and try to sort of *feel* where they occur in your mouth. Pay close attention to where your tongue is. Like, an open mouth “ahh” sound, like the o in “rock” should feel like it’s happening back towards your throat. In the word “stone”, you’ll start with a middle of the mouth oh sound that transitions ([via diphthong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphthong)) to an oo sound that should feel like it’s happening towards the front, with your lips.
Similarly, you can start with ahh again and then go to an eh sound, like in “then” that moves a little forward, and then ih as in “ship”, and then ee as in “sheep”. In the middle, you have the diphthong that makes an English “long I” sound, as in “bright” that goes from ah to ee, “long A” sound, as in “great” that goes from eh to ee. Hopefully, you can feel what I’m talking about with all these things, especially with where your tongue is. When scholars say that vowels shifted “towards the front of the mouth” or “higher in the mouth”, that’s what they’re talking about. Take all those sounds that feel like they happen in the back towards the throat, and just kind of…move them up a bit. Wikipedia has some examples:
> * Long i in mite was pronounced as /iː/, so Middle English mite sounded similar to Modern English meet.
* Long e in meet was pronounced as /eː/, so Middle English meet sounded similar to modern Australian English met but pronounced longer.
* Long a in mate was pronounced as /aː/, with a vowel similar to the broad a of ma.
* Long o in boot was pronounced as /oː/, so Middle English boot sounded similar to modern Southern England, Australian and New Zealand English bought.
Ignore the IPA symbols there. So, [in pronunciation, not spelling] “maht” became “mate”, and “mate” became “meet”, and “meet” became “mite”, *broadly speaking*. This happened to English “long vowels” which meant the vowels literally were spoken for a slightly longer amount of time. It’s also where we used diphthongs. As the link above explains, a diphthong is where you use two or more vowel sounds together as one syllable. For example, “my” is really the sounds “mah” + “ee” but shoved together so it becomes one sound. During the Great Vowel Shift, a lot of long vowels went from being one vowel sound held for a duration to being a diphthong of two sounds said together.
All of these changes occurred over a few hundred years, from about 1400 to 1700, and is what linguists use to mark when Middle English became Modern English. Like the evolution of species, exactly when one species has evolved into a new species is not a line but a sort of smear across time. You could, with effort, understand someone speaking Middle English. It’s *almost* the same language “species” as the English we speak today. Old English is very different, though. the GVS is a good transition to point to and say, “there was Middle English, and then *something something something* for 300 years, and now we have Modern English.”
Scholars still debate *why* the GVS happened. There are a lot of explanations, not least of which is an influx of French; or, conversely, the English wanting to *stop* sounding French, or stop sounding poor and uncultured.
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