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.
