The Great Vowel Shift

Let’s make some vowels. Go ahh or ehh or eee, and you’ve got the idea.

These sounds are typically positioned between consonants, which give the word a structure. The vowels live for those consonants.

About six centuries ago, English vowels began to shift. That ahh sound that lived inside words, between consonants, eventually became eee.

Over about three centuries from about 1400-1700, English long vowels did a little bit of mouth-wiggling. They moved around, and some existing vowel sounds took the place of others. The pronunciation of loads of our most common words changed dramatically.

Remember ahh, ehh, and eee? Those sounds are in that order for a reason. Feel how your tongue sort of relaxes for the first sound? Ahh is even used to indicate relaxation in common speech, and you usually don’t have to say anything else to get your point across.

Ehh introduces a little tension, doesn’t it? Feel your tongue sort of flexing its muscle as you widen your lips slightly? Now, try eee. Notice how this moves your mouth even further in the direction ehh sent it in.

This is the essence of what happened with the English language for those three centuries.

Meanwhile, literate people would just write down the words as they sounded, with pronunciation being the true north star. Then, a funny thing happened: the printing press began to take over the information sphere. Fortunately for England, literacy would now be spreading rapidly. Unfortunately, the spellings were locked in right as the Great Vowel Shift was really taking off.

Printing sealed the deal on spelling for a lot of common English words. That’s why we have such a great fossil record of pronunciation from several centuries ago.

“Beet” became bite. “Shape” became sheep. “Moan” became moon.

Few of the spellings changed once they were locked in, but those vowel pronunciations sure did.