English Pronunciation and English Spelling are very different. The reason is, of course, historical. The language suffered different dialectal changes before it become one unified form, roughly speaking, of course. At least, the form we mostly see described in dictionaries and books is the so-called standard form of the English language, whether it be American or British, the two major standards.
As I say, the spelling was not so distant from its pronunciation some centuries ago. This convergence towards one unified form originated in the many different dialects spoken in the British Isles 500 years ago. The phenomenon is known as the Great Vowels Shift. You should have a look at that and maybe still wonder why "moon" evolved from /o:/ to /u:/ but "foot" became /U/ as in should... Any idea? Posts are welcome!!!
9 comments:
I don't know how to think about this so called "vowel shift". I always thought that languages had a tencency towards simplification, and this chart is a total contradiction in relation to that theory. I find no explanation to this kind of "evolution", so my opinion is that it was probably caused by an external influence, maybe by the French invasion (but this is only a guess).
PD: I don't know if this is the kind of post we are supposed to write, so excuse me if I'm doing it wrong.
Well, it is great that you leave your opinion, but it is hard to explain history with opinions. History is based on facts, so, if you don´t have them, you'd better look for them!
I don´t know why Eduardo thinks languages work towards simplification. Languages are extremely complex, but sometimes speakers do evolve towards simplification. Syntactically speaking, languages change very slowly. Lexically speaking, languages grow everyday, more in the last decades than never before. It is true that some words become old-fashioned, but they get substituted by other new terms and new realities constantly force the creation of new terminology.
As I see it and with all what I read about the Great Vowel Shift, I think that when long vowels changed 500 years ago, they didn't change overnigth, but the change was produced progessively. Even, I had read that the GVS happened in eigth steps. One of these steps was that /o/ moves up in the Cardinal Vowel Scale, becoming /u/, so at any given time, people of different ages and from different regions would have different pronunciations of the same word. That is, some persons used /u:/ and others used /u/ in the same word, but only one of the pronunciations has lasted till now in each word. It could be the explanation of that "moon" and "foot", which both come from /o:/, have different vowels now. That is my opinion.
I know that English has nothing to do with Spanish, for instance, but I´ve always wondered why words that have the same vowels or couple of them (in diphthongs) are pronounced in a different way. Now, I know that it´s due to the so-called "Great Vowel Shift". There are several theories that try to explain the evolution of the sound of vowels throught the history of English from the "Chaucer´s language" to nowadays pronunciation. The most plausible one would be in concerns with the massive influx of loan words, like Old French loan words coming into adoptiom into Middle English or the loan words from Romance languages during the Middle English and Early Modern English that helped to shape the English vowels during this time.
me, vowel shift is the change, but I believe that lange was always pronounced in that way, I believe that change in pronunciation was caused by evolution , and by revolution that people caused in the history.
Pd:I don't know If it's good, excuse me!
I think this could happen because of the influence of Romance languages. Nowadays a lot of languages are influenced by English, because Anglosaxon countries are the most powerful in the world and people use to imitate people who have power (because of the jealousy, ambition.. I don't know why exactly). This was just the opposite 500 years ago. Spain was the centre of the world in that moment, and a couple of years later France was (because of the French Revolution). I mean, this could happen because English people was to imitate countries that were in fashion, and I notice that Romance languages have more diphthongs that Middle English, whose most of vowels were monophthongs, so I think it's possible they started to complicate sounds turning monophthongs into diphthongs to make sounds look like French or Spanihs. That's my opinion.
while Colonization period British empire was Protestant, so they was very open-mind about languages and because they interchange many words with colonies they need more vowels to oppose the inmense quantity of words that they get.
I've just read that some theories attach the cause to the mass immigration to the south east of England after the Black Death (pandemic), where the difference in accents led to certain groups modifying their speech to allow for a standard pronunciation of vowel sounds. The different dialects and the rise of a standardised middle class in London led to changes in pronunciation, which continued to spread out from that city.The sudden social mobility after that may have caused the shift, with people from lower levels in society moving to higher levels. Another explanation highlights the language of the ruling class; the medieval aristocracy had spoken French, but by the early 15th century, they were using English. This may have caused a change to the "prestige accent" of English, either by making pronunciation more French in style, or by changing it in some other way, perhaps by hypercorrection to something thought to be "more English". Another influence may have been the great political and social upheavals of the fifteenth century, which were largely contemporaneous with the Great Vowel Shift. I think all of this explanations have sense of course, so whatever could be the real reason, or it could be a mix of all, and by evolution and contact with others cultures, progessively occur this changes. But is so bright the great separation from writing to speaking. Anyway, I have to read something else about this to give more weight to my comments.
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