Phonological Shifts in English: Vowels, Consonants, Stress
The Great Vowel Shift
The Great Vowel Shift was the greatest and most important phonological change in the history of English. Yet, Old English spelling was maintained because printers based spelling on medieval manuscripts, not on the new pronunciation. For example:
- Middle English: feet [e]
- Modern English: feet [i:]
Learned men preferred an archaic spelling: ‘y’ was used as ‘th’:
- ‘y’ as an abbreviation of ‘that’
- ‘ye’ as an abbreviation of ‘the’
- Example: Ye Olde Shoppe
‘i’ as a vowel and ‘j’ as a consonant were not established until the 17th century (King James Bible and Shakespeare). The ‘h’ sound was lost in Late Latin, but French scribes, influenced by classical Latin, restored it in the spelling of many words, although it was not pronounced. During the Renaissance, ‘h’ was put after ‘t’ in many foreign words:
- Latin: thronus
- Old French: trone
- English: throne (also in theatre, thesis, anthem, Anthony, etc.)
In Latin and French, the ‘h’ was not pronounced, but later in English, it began to be pronounced. Other Renaissance respellings include:
- det to debt (Latin: debitum)
- dout to doubt (Latin: dubitare)
- indit to indict
- sutle to subtle
Why Did the Great Vowel Shift Happen?
Why did the pronunciation of /i/ and /u/ change in the first place, setting the whole Great Vowel Shift in motion? There are no recordings from that time, so linguists do not know the exact reasons. We know it happened because ‘uneducated’ people would usually write out words that they did not know phonetically.
Recent research: The traditional analogy describes links in a chain, causing the others to move when pulled. In the 1980s, based on textual evidence and dialectal survey material, a new theory emerged, proposing two separate shifts:
- First, from 1450 to 1550
- Second, from 1650 to 1750
These shifts belonged to two different parts of the country. They then merged due to repeated exposure in mixed contexts of commerce and trade. This could explain why some of the monophthong vowels shifted places and became different monophthongs, while other monophthong vowels shifted and became diphthongs (Crystal).
Consonant Changes
- [ç]: Voiceless palatal fricative next to front vowels disappeared (no longer pronounced) but is present in spelling. Examples: bright, sigh, weigh.
- [x]: Voiceless velar fricative next to back vowels disappeared or became voiceless labiodental fricative [f]. Examples: cough, laugh, enough.
- [l]: In ‘al’ before consonants, it was lost after first becoming a vowel. Middle English ‘al’ and ‘au’ fell together: al + au became au, then []. Examples: talk, walk.
- Except before ‘f’, ‘v’, and ‘m’: ‘al’ became [a:] or [æ]. Examples: half, calm.
- [l] in ‘ol’ was also lost before some consonants. Examples: folk, Holmes.
- ‘h’: In French loanwords like host and humble, ‘h’ has come to be pronounced. In other words, it is not pronounced. Examples: honest, hour, heir, honor.
- ‘-ing’: When unstressed, it had long been pronounced [in]. The velarization of [n] to [ŋ] began as hypercorrection in the first quarter of the 19th century.
Stress Changes
There was great variety in stress (Shakespeare’s rhymes). Many words were stressed differently. Examples: illústrate, concéntrate, charácter, contemplate. Most polysyllabic words ending in -able or -ible had initial stress and a second stress on the penultimate syllable. Most words with final stress now have initial stress. Examples: ántique, compléte.
Grammar Changes: Nouns
By the end of Middle English, ‘-es’ was the genitive singular and caseless plural suffix. Most nouns had only two forms (sister/sisters), as they do today. The use of the apostrophe for the genitive singular (sister’s) and plural (sisters’) was not adopted until the 17th and 18th centuries, respectively.
Irregular Plurals
Mutated vowel plurals resisted the analogical principle: feet, geese, teeth, lice, mice, men, women. A few ‘-n’ plurals remained: eyen (eyes), shoon (shoes), kine (cows), brethren (brothers), children, oxen. Kine, brethren, and children had no ‘-n’ in Old English! Oxen is the only pure survival of the Old English weak declension.
Uninflected Plurals
Uninflected plurals (words which have the same form in singular and plural) survive today. Examples: deer, sheep, swine, folk, kind. Analogical ‘folks’ occurred early in Modern English; kind has acquired an ‘s’ plural.
His-Genitive
The use of his, her, their as signs of the genitive began in Old English. Example: Augustus his daughter became Augustus’ daughter in the 16th-17th centuries.
Group Genitive
This developed in early Modern English. Example: The Tale of the Wife of Bath became The Wife of Bath’s Tale. Also with two nouns: ‘an hour or two’s time’.
Uninflected Genitive
This occurs in special circumstances, especially with nouns ending in [s] or before [s]. Example: For God’s sake.