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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The name is a bit of a misnomer because it includes changes in pronunciation to consonants, adopting some French pronunciations, adopting a TON of French vocabulary, losing grammatical gender, AND shifting English long vowels.
For example, consider the noun meat. As in, the thing you eat after you kill an animal. It is pronounced indistinguishably from mete, as in to mete out punishment, or meet, as in to meet a friend for lunch. In old English, the vowels would be independently pronounced. However, in some cases, like the word out, it shifted from sounding like someone saying ‘uttt’ to ‘ow-t’. English started to ‘vowel’ break, or create diphthongs. In English, a dipthong combines two vowels to create one sound. It isn’t always unique, as in our previous example with mete and meet, the second word includes a dipthong but the pronunciation is the same as other words which don’t have them. Or, as in ‘out’, it forms a vowel sound that is unlike any other vowel in English.
People often don’t mention the development of SVO as part of the shift because, strictly speaking, it doesn’t have much to do with pronunciation, but it is worth talking about. English tells you what the subject, verb, direct object, and indirect object are by syntactic context, that is you figure out what the words do by their placement in the sentence. Syntax is how you describe one or more words ordered in a way that makes sense. Gendered languages use syntax less or not at all. In order to accomplish this, a complex set of declensions are needed for nouns, since I need to convey possession number AND its function in the sentence by changing the morphology of the word. Or, more familiarly, case endings and prefixes. Since a language will contain a bunch of nouns, it is hard to make all nouns follow the same rules. To deal with that, we gender nouns, or classify them into big buckets. European languages tend to have 3, masculine, feminine, and neuter. It is important to understand that these bear little to no relation to sex. English jettisoned gendered nouns in favor of SVO construction at the beginning of the ‘great vowel shift.’
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