This ruined English spelling

Summary

The video explains why English spelling is so inconsistent, focusing on the Great Vowel Shift, a centuries-long change in pronunciation starting in the 15th century. This shift altered long vowels, making words like 'meat' and 'meet' sound the same, while other words developed multiple pronunciations for the same spelling. Factors such as the Black Death, migration, fashion, and the printing press contributed to these changes. The video highlights how these historical shifts in language still impact English today, making it a fascinating look into the evolution of English spelling and pronunciation.

Takeaways

• 🌀 The Great Vowel Shift (GVS) was a centuries-long process that significantly changed the pronunciation of long vowels in English.
• 📜 The GVS played a huge role in making English spelling and pronunciation inconsistent, as vowels shifted in predictable patterns over time.
• 📅 The GVS took place between the 15th and 18th centuries, covering the transition from Middle English (Chaucer's era) to Early Modern English (Shakespeare's era).
• 📈 Vowel sounds moved higher in the mouth and sometimes further forward, resulting in changes like 'meat' once sounding like 'mate' before settling on its modern pronunciation.
• 🔄 The GVS caused the pronunciation of certain words to converge, like 'meet' and 'meat,' creating confusion in spelling and pronunciation.
• 🎭 The shift didn't happen uniformly, with northern English dialects being less affected. This led to modern regional variations in pronunciation.
• 🇫🇷 External factors, like migration, the influence of French, and even social changes like the Black Death, likely contributed to the vowel shift.
• 🖨️ The arrival of the printing press during the GVS helped standardize English spelling, but this occurred mid-change, freezing inconsistent pronunciations into written form.
• 📚 The evolution of spelling didn't just involve vowels; consonants also shifted, with many letters becoming silent (e.g., the 'gh' in 'through' and the 'k' in 'knight').
• ⚙️ The GVS is considered a chain reaction, where one vowel change led to another, making English spelling today a snapshot of historical pronunciation.

Q & A

What is the Great Vowel Shift, and why is it significant?

The Great Vowel Shift was a centuries-long process, from the 15th to the 18th century, during which the pronunciation of long vowels in English changed dramatically. It is significant because it explains why many words that are spelled similarly today are pronounced differently, causing inconsistencies in English spelling and pronunciation.

How did the Great Vowel Shift affect the pronunciation of words like 'meat' and 'meet'?

During the Great Vowel Shift, 'meat' was pronounced as 'mairt' in Middle English, but later shifted to 'mate' and eventually became 'meat' as we pronounce it today. 'Meet' also changed during this period, resulting in the convergence of their pronunciations, even though they are spelled differently.

Why do words like 'beat', 'bear', 'break', and 'bread' all have different pronunciations despite similar spellings?

The varying pronunciations of 'EA' in words like 'beat', 'bear', 'break', and 'bread' are partly due to the influence of the sounds that follow the vowel pair. For example, 'break' and 'steak' rhyme because of the 'k' sound after the 'EA', while 'bear', 'wear', and 'tear' rhyme due to the 'r' sound following the vowel.

How did the Black Death contribute to the Great Vowel Shift?

The Black Death caused large population movements, as people migrated to cities like London to take advantage of higher wages due to labor shortages. These migrations brought together people with different dialects, influencing one another's speech patterns, which may have contributed to the changes in vowel pronunciation during the Great Vowel Shift.

What role did the printing press play in the Great Vowel Shift?

The printing press led to the standardization of English spelling at a time when pronunciation was still changing. As a result, many spellings were fixed before the Great Vowel Shift was complete, causing a mismatch between how words are spelled and how they are pronounced today.

Why do Northern English dialects differ from Southern English dialects in their vowel pronunciation?

The Great Vowel Shift primarily affected the area around London and the English Midlands, which became the dominant form of British English. However, Northern English dialects were less affected by the shift. For example, Northern dialects retain the pronunciation of 'but' as 'butt,' while Southern English changed it to 'but.'

Why does American English differ from British English in certain vowel pronunciations?

American English developed during a period when Southern British English was still undergoing further changes after the Great Vowel Shift. As a result, American English retains some older pronunciations, such as the short 'a' sound in words like 'bath' and 'grass,' while British English developed a longer vowel sound.

How did silent letters, such as the 'gh' in 'through' and the 'k' in 'knight,' become part of English spelling?

During the transition from Middle to Early Modern English, certain consonant sounds, like the 'gh' and 'k,' were either dropped or became silent. These letters were often retained in spelling to reflect their historical presence, even though they are no longer pronounced.

What is the impact of fashion and prestige on language change during the Great Vowel Shift?

It is possible that people changed their ways of speaking to sound more prestigious or fashionable, consciously adopting new pronunciations to reflect social status. This may have contributed to the vowel changes seen during the Great Vowel Shift.

How did English spelling become inconsistent due to the Great Vowel Shift?

English spelling became inconsistent because the pronunciation of words changed while their spellings were being standardized. As vowels shifted and consonants became silent, the written forms of words often no longer matched how they were pronounced, leading to the many irregularities in English spelling today.

Outlines

00:00

🤔 The Confusion of English Pronunciation

The paragraph introduces the perplexing nature of English spelling and pronunciation, particularly how identical letter clusters can produce different sounds. The primary reason for this is attributed to a historical phenomenon known as the Great Vowel Shift (GVS), which caused significant changes in the pronunciation of English vowels. This process spanned centuries, from the 15th to the 18th century, and transformed vowel sounds in a systematic way. The paragraph explains how GVS created the disparities between words like 'look' and 'spook' or 'great' and 'beat'.

05:02

📜 Chaucer’s Rhymes and Shifting Sounds

In this paragraph, Chaucer’s writings are used to illustrate the shift in vowel sounds over time. Before the GVS, words like 'breath' and 'heath' rhymed, but this changed as 'heath' underwent the typical vowel shifts, while 'breath' shortened, aligning with words like 'head' and 'dead'. Additionally, words with double O, like 'look' and 'spook', behaved inconsistently, leading to different pronunciations such as 'blood'. The journey of various words through the GVS, such as 'boat', 'folk', and 'bite', is detailed, showing the significant differences in how English pronunciation evolved.

10:05

🌍 The Impact of Migration and Printing on Language

The paragraph discusses how external factors, such as the Black Death and increased migration to cities like London, influenced the Great Vowel Shift. People from different dialectal backgrounds mixed, leading to shifts in pronunciation. French influence and fashion trends may have also driven some of the vowel changes. The invention of the printing press is highlighted as a major factor in language standardization, which, alongside the GVS, caused spelling to become fixed even as pronunciation continued to evolve. This led to many of the spelling irregularities in modern English.

🗣 Regional Variations and the GVS’s Legacy

Regional differences in the GVS are explored, with northern dialects, for example, retaining older pronunciations of words like 'but'. This contrasts with the changes seen in southern English accents. The paragraph also explains how English dialects across the Atlantic, such as in America and Canada, evolved differently due to the GVS ending before further changes occurred. Differences in words like 'bath', 'grass', and 'dance' between American and British English are linked to this historical phenomenon.

🔤 Consonant Shifts and English Spelling Chaos

The final paragraph focuses on consonant changes during the Early Modern English period that further complicated spelling. Sounds like the 'gh' in 'through' and 'sight' either disappeared or shifted to 'f', as seen in 'cough' and 'rough'. Other changes include the silent 'L' in words like 'folk' and 'palm'. The reintroduction of silent letters in words like 'fault' and 'debt', influenced by Latin, added further complexity. The T in 'often' reappeared in modern speech, influenced by spelling, but inconsistencies in silent letters remain. These changes contribute to the ongoing challenges of English spelling.

Keywords

💡The Great Vowel Shift

The Great Vowel Shift (GVS) refers to a major linguistic phenomenon that occurred between the 15th and 18th centuries, where the pronunciation of long vowels in English dramatically changed. It explains why modern English pronunciation differs so much from Middle English, with words like 'meat' and 'meet' now sounding the same but originally pronounced differently. This shift is central to understanding why English spelling is often inconsistent with pronunciation.

💡Pronunciation

Pronunciation refers to how words are spoken and how their sounds have evolved over time. The video discusses how vowel sounds in particular have shifted, leading to modern inconsistencies in spelling and pronunciation, such as the differences between 'look' and 'spook' or 'beat' and 'bear.' Pronunciation changes due to the Great Vowel Shift significantly altered the sound of English.

💡Middle English

Middle English refers to the form of English spoken from around the 11th to the late 15th century. It was the language of Geoffrey Chaucer and predates the Great Vowel Shift. The video contrasts Middle English pronunciations, like 'meat' (pronounced 'mairt'), with modern pronunciations to show how drastically the language has changed.

💡Early Modern English

Early Modern English is the form of English spoken after Middle English, from the late 15th century until around the 17th century, during the time of Shakespeare. It was during this period that the Great Vowel Shift occurred, leading to the language's evolving pronunciation and many of the spelling-pronunciation mismatches we have today.

💡Chain reaction

The video explains that the Great Vowel Shift can be seen as a 'chain reaction,' where changes in one vowel sound caused subsequent changes in other vowel sounds. For example, as the vowel sound 'ehh' moved to 'ayy,' other vowels adjusted accordingly, which helps explain why English vowels shifted in a consistent pattern over time.

💡Convergence

Convergence refers to the process where words that were once pronounced differently begin to sound the same due to the vowel shifts. For instance, the words 'meat' and 'meet' had distinct pronunciations before the Great Vowel Shift, but they became homophones (sounding the same) during the shift, which has led to confusing spelling conventions in modern English.

💡Spelling standardization

Spelling standardization occurred alongside the Great Vowel Shift due to the invention of the printing press and the creation of dictionaries. While pronunciations were shifting, spelling became more fixed, leading to many of the inconsistencies in modern English spelling. Words like 'ough' are examples of this problem, with their multiple pronunciations locked into their historical spellings.

💡Printing press

The printing press, invented in the 15th century, played a key role in the standardization of English spelling. The video mentions that as books became more widely available, people started to see written words more frequently, which influenced how they pronounced them. The printing press helped fix spellings even as pronunciations were still changing, creating many modern spelling issues.

💡Black Death

The Black Death, which struck Europe in the 14th century, is mentioned as a possible trigger for the Great Vowel Shift. The plague led to mass migrations and a mixing of dialects as people moved to cities for work. This linguistic mingling likely contributed to the shifts in pronunciation, as new speech patterns emerged from different dialects influencing one another.

💡Homophones

Homophones are words that sound the same but have different meanings or spellings. The video uses 'meet' and 'meat' as an example of homophones that became pronounced the same during the Great Vowel Shift, leading to modern confusion in spelling. Other examples include 'sea' and 'see,' which also converged during this linguistic transition.

Highlights

The Great Vowel Shift is the biggest reason why the same letter clusters in English make different sounds depending on the word.

The Great Vowel Shift was a centuries-long process that caused the pronunciation of English long vowels to change completely, spanning from the 15th to 18th centuries.

The vowel changes during the Great Vowel Shift followed a consistent pattern, with vowel sounds moving higher up in the mouth.

Words like 'meat' and 'meet' became homophones during the Great Vowel Shift due to changes in pronunciation.

EA words like 'beat', 'bear', 'break', and 'bread' developed different sounds based on the vowels that followed them, contributing to irregular spelling.

The Black Death and mass migration to cities, especially London, after the plague may have influenced the dialectal mixing that led to the Great Vowel Shift.

Some linguists believe that fashion and prestige played a role in the vowel changes, as people adjusted their speech to sound more fashionable.

The printing press fixed spellings in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift, creating lasting discrepancies between pronunciation and spelling.

Words like 'through', 'rough', and 'cough' show inconsistencies due to the pronunciation of the GH sound disappearing or becoming an F.

Consonant changes, such as the silent L in 'folk' and 'palm', also contributed to spelling inconsistencies.

Some silent letters, such as the L in 'fault' and the C in 'perfect', were added later by scholars to reflect the words’ Latin roots.

The disappearance of consonants like the T in 'castle' and the D in 'handsome' led to further changes in pronunciation.

The inconsistent pronunciation of the T in 'often'—sometimes pronounced 'offen'—is an example of how spelling influenced speech over time.

The silent K and G in words like 'knight' and 'gnome' were once pronounced but became silent over time as language evolved.

English spelling is a snapshot of how words were pronounced at different times in history, which explains why modern spelling often seems inconsistent.

Transcripts

Why doesn’t that rhyme with that?

And why doesn’t that rhyme with that?

English spelling is apparently chaos with the same  

clusters of letters making different  sounds depending on where you look.

But there are reasons for all of it

and one single bizarre phenomenon  plays a bigger part than any other.

Let’s get to the bottom of it in another RobWords.

So why is English so messed up that we can spell  

lots of different sounds  in lots of different ways?

Well if we’re going to look - of should that  be lewk - for the single biggest reason,

then we need look no further  than The Great Vowel Shift.

The Great Vowel Shift is the reason why “look”  

doesn’t rhyme with “spook” and  “great” doesn’t rhyme with “beat”.

It’s to blame for a lot of things.

The term Great Vowel Shift was coined by a  Danish linguist called Otto Jespersen who  

showed an enviable level of maturity by  not calling it the Great Vowel Movement

and it refers to a centuries-long  process that saw the pronunciation  

of the so-called long vowels  in English change completely.

The GVS - as all the hippest  linguists call it - took ages

from as early as the 15th century to  arguably as late as the 18th century.

So that’s the end of the Middle English  period - the English of Chaucer - and  

through the period of Early Modern  English, the English of Shakespeare.

As well as taking ages, it also  played out in several stages.

But nevertheless, the Great  Vowel Shift gets treated as  

a single phenomenon - the great  vowel shift, rather than shifts -

because all of the changes can be  seen as part of a chain reaction,

with each vowel sound  changing in a predictable way.

Let me try and explain this with the  help of this handy diagram of a mouth.

It doesn’t look like a mouth at the moment,  

but just let me add a few things  to help with the visualisation.

So this is the chart that linguists  

use to describe where in the mouth the many  different vowel sounds we make are produced.

You can find it online with sounds and clicking  around on it definitely isn’t hilarious.

[Website sounds] Ooh, err, uh, ay, orr

Anyway let’s simplify all that and just plot on  

the vowel sounds affected  by the Great Vowel Shift.

Now don’t stress about what  these phonetic symbols mean

like what the heck is that?  and what does that one mean?

It’s not that important. The reason I’m  showing you this is to show how uniformly  

the vowel sounds in words change during the  Great Vowel Shift, because there’s a pattern.

Words that contain any of these vowels at the  start of the Great Vowel Shift end the Great Vowel  

Shift with a vowel sound that is produced higher  up and sometimes further forward in the mouth.

So words that were pronounced with an  “ehh” start to be pronounced with an  

“ayy”. Or words that were pronounced with  an “ohh” were pronounced with an “ooh”.

The only exceptions are the sounds that  were already at the top of the mouth,  

which move towards the  centre and become diphthongs.

But again, ignore the phonetics jargon.

All you need to take away from this is that  there is a consistent direction of travel  

that vowel sounds are moving in and that’s  why the Great Vowel Shift is seen as this  

single phenomenon despite taking several  hundreds of years and happening in stages.

But let’s get to the meat of this and talk about  how specific words changed as a result of it all.

Well “meat” is actually a great example.  It enters the Great Vowel Shift with its  

Middle English pronunciation mairt, part-way  through its pronunciation becomes more like  

“mate” and by the end it’s pronounced  much more like we say it now: meat.

And by the way, we pronounced another  word like that, don’t we? Meet.

And it’s during one of the stages  of the Great Vowel Shift that the  

pronunciations of these two  words unhelpfully converge.

So you see how spelling is getting  messed up here? Because at the same  

time the pronunciations of see and sea  become the same. So do piece and peace.

And that’s because some words go through more  stages than others, leaving other words that  

are spelt the same behind and converging  with words that are spelt differently.

EA words are the best example of this. Just think  

about the different sounds those  two letters can make together.

They make one sound in beat,  but a different one in bear.

And another one in break. And another in bread.

And the reasons why these  EA sounds are different is  

partially down to the sounds that come after them.

You can see this in the fact that break and steak  rhyme, because they both have the K after the EA.

That appears to have played a part in how their  pronunciation changed during the vowel shift.

The same goes for bear rhyming with wear  and tear, because they all share that rrr.

Grrr.

By the way, the fact that these four letters can  

also be pronounced teer shows just  how messed up this whole thing is.

…and also why the consonant  sounds don’t explain anything.

Just look at this quote from Geoffrey Chaucer,  

who was writing before the Great Vowel Shift,  or at least only in the early stages of it.

We can learn so much about how vowel  sounds changed just by looking at  

the words that so far as he was concerned, rhymed.

In his London dialect, anyway.

So to Chaucer the words breath and heath  rhymed. They were “brayth” and “hayth”.

But they don’t to us anymore.

And that’s because heath went through the  normal changes we’d expect from the Great  

Vowel Shift. But breath shortened  like vowel sounds in head and dead.

Double O words also behaved inconsistently during  

the Great Vowel Shift. Hence my  earlier point about look and spook.

But you also end up with another sound in blood.

Let’s look at a few more words  that changed during this period.

Well one word that had an interesting voyage  through the Great Vowel Shift is the word boat,  

which is pronounced bort - like the modern German  

word for boat is now - at the  start of the great vowel shift

but more like it is now by the end.

And actually folk is pronounced more like  

the German word Volk before  its vowel sound shifts too.

And In Middle English, the word bite is  pronounced more like beet. In Early Modern  

English - so during the shift - it morphs into  bate, and by the present day it becomes bite.

Right? So these differences are big aren’t they?

The way people were speaking changed dramatically.

Chaucer and Shakespeare would have had an awful  

lot of trouble understanding  one another as a result.

So whee oh whee… sorry, why  oh why, did all this happen?

Well, that’s a very difficult question  with a lot of very interesting answers.

The most grim among them is that it  was triggered by this: the Black Death.

The violent plague that struck much  of Europe - including England - in  

the middle of the 14th century  forced people to move around.

In the wake of the plague they  flocked to devastated cities  

like London to take advantage of higher  wages caused by new shortages of people.

So people with different dialects started to mix  

and probably influence one  another’s ways of speaking.

Among those to flood into England’s  cities were also migrants from abroad,  

whose accents may also have  influenced local dialects.

Now, this is a good time to mention the French,  

because they may also have played  a role in the Great Vowel Shift.

Over the centuries during  which the shift took place,  

the French went from basically running  England to being its sworn enemies.

And some linguists have suggested that attempts to  

sound either more or less French may  have driven some of the vowel changes.

That’s interesting isn’t it, because that suggests  that the Great Vowel Shift was somehow conscious

and that leads us to another possible  contributing factor: fashion.

It’s possible that people were changing the ways  

they spoke to sound either more  prestigious or more fashionable.

Fascinating stuff, right?

And then, there’s another major development  in not just the history of England, but the  

history of language all over the world,  that almost certainly played its part.

The invention of the printing press.

Suddenly, people can get  books. Literacy increases,  

and people are seeing words  written down for the first time.

As a result they’re changing the way  they speak to match the spellings.

That’s an amazing idea right?  And it’s one we can relate to.

You know, it’s not so long ago that forehead was  

more commonly pronounced forrud and  arctic was often pronounced artic.

In fact, you can still hear  both but those pronunciations,  

but the pronunciations closer to the  spellings have ultimately won out.

Anyway, we need to do a bit more  finger pointing at the printing press,  

because many of the spelling problems we’ve  talked about are ultimately its fault.

The arrival of the printing  press leads to a certain  

level of standardization of English spelling.

Dictionaries start to be written which help  to fix how certain words should be written.

But all of this is happening in  the middle of the flippin’ vowel  

shift meaning that spellings  are getting fixed mid-change.

As I explained in a video ages ago: the fact  we have about a dozen ways of pronouncing  

ough is partly down to the words having  their spellings fixed at different times,  

or at times when they were pronounced the same.

So we’ve got the Black Death, immigration,  fashion and the printing press:

just some of the probable explanations for the  cause and continuation of the Great Vowel Shift.

But as I said up top, the  shift was a chain of events,  

where one change happens and that causes the next.

So it’s the cause of that first  change that we really need to find,  

and that has so far proven illusive.

By the way, it’s important to point out that  

the Great Vowel Shift didn’t  happen the same everywhere.

These changes are primarily happening in the  area around London and the English Midlands,  

the dialects of which do become the  dominant form of British English.

But different areas were affected  to lesser or greater extents by the  

shift and that’s apparent in accent  variations across England today.

For example, Northern dialects didn’t  see the change in the pronunciation of  

the word “but” that gave us “but”  in the southern English accents.

Where I come from we still say  “butt”. And catch the bus to Lundun.

And you don’t just see - or hear -  the evidence of variations in England.

In Canada it’s there in the way  people say “aboat” instead of “about”.

Which reminds me: the end of the  Great Vowel Shift doesn’t leave  

all the vowel sounds in British English the  way they are now. They continue to develop.

But in the meantime, the English language  crosses the Atlantic and an American English  

starts to develop, free of the further  changes that happen in Southern England.

That’s why American English,  like Northern English,  

doesn’t have that long vowel  sound in bath and grass and dance.

However North American English makes up for it  

by incorporating a similar vowel sound  into words like not and caught and hot.

Okay, we’ve covered the GVS and its aftermath,  

but the death of English spelling isn’t  just a case of “Murder most vowel”.

[jaunty song] “Rob did a joke there”

“Wasn’t it fun?”

“It was a pun on Murder Most Foul.”

Consonant changes also characterise  the shift from Middle English to  

Early Modern English and wreak havoc  with the ways we write things down.

I touched on one earlier when I mentioned  the different pronunciations of this.

You see, In a lot of cases the  sound the GH would have represented,  

a sort of ghh sound, either disappears  completely or turns into an F sound.

So we say throo instead of through and  site rather than sicht and coff instead  

of cough and ruff instead of rough.

It’s during the Early Modern English  period that certain Ls become silent,  

like in folk, but also in almond and palm.

Now if you’re thinking “but I do  pronounce those Ls” that’s because  

your dialect either didn’t drop them or  has reinstated them based on the spelling.

Annoyingly, at around the same time, some Ls were  put into words that never previously had them too.

For example, fault never had an L  until some know-all scholar popped  

one in to show off the word’s Latin heritage.

They did the same with the C in perfect  and also the silent letters in words like  

debt and receipt, but we didn’t  start to pronounce those ones.

Early Modern English also sees the T  sound disappear from castle and hasten,  

as well as the D sound in handsome and landscape.

Although the D in landscape is definitely  back and I guess some people maybe  

pronounce handsome in hands-ome -  again, influenced by the spelling.

The T in often is another good case of  this. Queen Elizabeth the first supposedly  

pronounced it offen, but as early as the  17th century, the T was being pronounced  

again by some people who’d spotted it in the  spelling and also in its relation to oft.

Now lots of people say of-ten and it’s absolutely  

fine. I fact I think a lot  of the time I say of-ten.

Interestingly though: no one says sof-ten.

And just one more change that  really messes up our spelling.

Around the 17th century Ks and Gs start to  fall silent in words like knight and gnome,  

having previously been pronounced.

Linguists think this is probably just  because nee is easier to say than k-nee.

Ni! Ni. Ni. We humans do tend towards the lazy.

And on that broad philosophical  point… there we have it.

To sum up: English spelling has suffered from the  

fact that pronunciation went through radical  changes - to both vowels and consonants - at  

precisely the time when we’re trying  to nail down the language on paper.

As a result, many spellings are  a snapshot of a moment in English  

history when a word was pronounced  rather differently to it is today.

Thanks Great Vowel Movement.

You’ve really helped us oot.

If you’ve enjoyed this video check,  you should watch this one here next.

And also check out my new podcast  Words Unravelled which you can  

watch here or you can listen to  wherever you get your podcasts.

Words Unravelled.

Until we mate again… take care.