This ruined English spelling

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.