Oh the Great Vowel Shift. What a mess you made. In this video, let's explore what the GVS was and why it screwed up English spelling forever.
⭐️PATREON COMMUNITY: patreon.com/robwords
📝FREE NEWSLETTER: www.robwords.com/newsletter
More excellent GVS videos:
• What Was the Great Vow...
• The Great Vowel Shift ...
• PHY117 - The Great Vow...
Vowel grid with sounds: www.ipachart.com/
Check me out on the web, on Twitter & TikTok:
robwords.com
x.com/robwordsYT
/ robwords
==CHAPTERS==
0:00 Introduction
0:36 What is the Great Vowel Shift?
3:24 Words that changed
5:09 Chaucer
5:40 More words that changed
6:38 Why did the GVS happen?
9:49 Variations in England, USA, Canada
11:07 Consonant changes
12:51 Often or offen?
13:18 Silent K and G
*elusive
Yes, at 9:48, just watched that bit and came to the comment section to be annoying and point it out! Great video by the way, as always!
yup! Good man to catch it. I think if language is your field, you have to be extra carful abut spelin words krectly... : )
Did the vowel shift miss Scotland (or parts of it)? An interesting change occurred in Spain as well. Phillip II, I think it was, had a lisp, today all people in Spain speak as if they had a lisp, which is distinct from the Spanish that is spoken in the Americas.
Lmao I thought it was a joke
@@kaneinkansas I don't think you can make a case that a ruler with a lisp somehow influenced an entire region to speak that way. Doesn't seem very likely. And not all Spaniards speak that way. It's primarily a feature of Catalonia, isn't it?
We should call it "The irritable vowel shift" then.
I have that evrry morning 😂😂😂😂❤ nice retort
So you're saying English has Irritable Vowel Syndrome...
This just made me think of the British policeman in Allo Allo, who pronounces the vowels all wrong. Also, the tech support guy in The It Crowd.
I support this
😂😂
Basically, English standardized its spelling at exactly the wrong moment.
Yes, you've nailed it on the head!
German is hard to learn, but large areas of the language are rule based. If you are a logical thinker you will love it. English is very chaotic.
@@thorstenjaspert9394 The vast majority of languages are rule-based with only a few exceptions. Even French, despite using a plethora of silent letters, is fairly predictable - even though I didn't study it beyond introductory level at school, I can still predict with good accuracy how the words would be pronounced. And for Romance languages, accents are used to emphasize vowels, thus providing a simple rule on when to put more emphasis on vowels. Sometimes I think that if English adopted a similar system, its spelling wouldn't be such a mess.
@@GTAVictor9128 I agree. Of course you can adapt spelling to the changes in pronunciation. It just needs a reform now and then.
Excellent explanation but the section in EA combination still leaves me why earth is pronunounced so oddly.
Very interesting! As a Dutch person learning to speak English it was very strange to see same spelling being pronounced very differently. The funny thing is that if I would pronounce the English words in a Dutch way (reading the words as if they were Dutch words), these words, I now find, sounded a lot like the original words. Keep on doing this good work, Rob!
It's really neat to see, isn't it. As a German speaker, realising that "light" was once pronounced basically exactly like modern German "Licht" was quite eye-opening. German did undergo a consonant shift that Dutch didn't though, so I wouldn't be surprised if you can find even more parallels there.
Guess Dutch, just like any other Germanic language other than English, simply did not undergo such a major shift.
And it's comparable to the differences between German and Dutch. As a native German speaker, I always have to smile when I hear people from the Netherlands speaking German in this absolutely cute accent. Especially when it's in the pitched voice of young women. Not sure why, but I like it a lot.
Both are like german a part of the west germanic language family.
I've read that Dutch is the easiest language for English speakers to learn, so I wonder if it's true the other way?
Oh, you did it! I asked you to do the great vowel shift in a comment on one of your previous videos. I told you I’d rather learn it from you than anyone. And now you have. Quite an undertaking to explain all that. Thank you so much.
English is a difficult language. It can be understood through tough thorough thought though….
For me, what works is when I shut off my thoughts completely. I just tell myself that English is weird, but it can't hepl it. It's not being mean, it's just a quirky little language boy. And it wants us to bask in its nonsensicalities. Yes, I made that word up.
My brain exploded
Just wait until you learn about buffalo.
@@hah-vj7hc No, you didn't. It's in the OED :)
You forgot "trough", which rhymes with "cough". :-)
“Look” and “spook” and “book” do all rhyme for me. (cries in Scottish)
I was confused by that one too. 🏴
Whereas "meat" and "meet" don't rhyme for me (in the Black Country "meat" is much closer to "great"). It's almost like these rules only apply to a very specific, highly formalised version of the language and the linguistic snobs are actually the ones who've got it "wrong". 🤔
@@ColaSpandex most of the things linguists do is describe the differences in dialects, and many of these differences come from participating or not participating in different vowel or consonant shifts - that's how we can land at a some kid. Of divergence line going something like standard English - Scottish English - dutch - frisian - lower German - high German
@@JonaxIII'm talking about snobs and pronunciation shaming, not linguists in general. I personally know people who have dropped their local accent because of this. We probably all do. Although this applies to lesser or greater degrees depending on where you're from. People from outside the Black Country actually refer to us as Yamyams based on the way we speak and this is generally intended to be derogatory.
That statement came into my head with a Scottish accent, sounding vaguely like Peter Capaldi.
This is very interesting and helps non-native speakers of English like me understand why words are spelt differently to how they're pronounced. And hats off to you, Rob, for explaining it so well. You made it really easy to understand. 👏👏
Around the sixth grade I decided to begin memorizing two versions of most English words: how they're pronounced and how they're spelled. My spelling greatly improved! Fifty years later the voice in my head is still saying words how they're spelled whenever I write something, even right ("rig-ht") now.
When I saw the video title, I shook an imaginary fist and blamed the French first and foremost.
Mon dieu!
Ça n’est pas de notre fau[l]te!
I'm hearing a taunt.....😅
C'est vrai! "The French, the most foriegn of the foreigners!" 😂
@@snowstrobe😂
This is BY FAR the easiest and most comprehensible explanation of the Great Vowel Shift i've ever seen. Every linguist will overcomplicate it by assuming you can fluently read the IPA and know exactly what are the various classifications of consonants and what's the exact difference between similar vowel sounds, so it always ends up sounding like an advanced algebra lesson instead of a quick 15 minute explaination.
The IPA alphabet is easy to learn especially since every symbol has exactly one sound for all time. If a pronunciation changes, so does the IPA spelling even if it doesn’t in the original language.
There's an India Pale Ale Alphabet? Sick bruh
I took several linguistics course, even managing to get an A from the head professor of the department, and I *still* have trouble reading the I.P.A. My joke is that I hate the taste of IPA so I am blocking it out 😁😂
The IPA is easy to read, especially for English. The problem is linguists and historians like to overcomplicate things unnecessarily by saying it didn’t really exist.
Indeed! He is a great teacher, for sure.
Thank you Love it. I'm a native English speaker and I used to have competitions with my Estonian friend making up sentences with the same words/pronunciation/sound eg: Row in a row while you row about the best way to eat roe. Or flying in plane, over a plain plain, thinking about how to sharpen your plane, wishing you were on a different plane...... Oh no, I've confused my old addled brain now 😵💫
I always enjoyed: "They asked me to lead them to the lead deposits, so I led them."
Did you ever come across the buffalo sentence? Sounds like you'd get a kick out of it.
Tear up when you tear up the book you read when read again
Or he read the red reed that people read readily...
My students in Morocco sometimes have a hard time with something like this: ship the sheep on a cheap ship. They have a really hard time distinguishing between the -i- and the -ee-. Also, b/c they all learned French before English they can get the English -th- wrong in sentences like: I thought I taught it; you missed it, so tough though.
Thank you Rob! I’m an ESL teacher, and these videos have helped me explain some of our strange English pronunciation and spelling to my students 😊
Looking at the three main western germanic languages, English went through its great vowel shift; High German underwent its consonant shift; Dutch basically ignored these changes. That's why you find quite a few cognates where the Dutch word has roughly the same consonants as English, and roughly the same vowels as German - appel/apple/Apfel straat/street/Straße.
Dutch vowels did undergo some diphthongization though. For instance, the "ui" and "ij" used to be pronounced [yː] and [iː].
Well, Appel is definitely a word we still use in German today. It sounds funny and dated, that's why it's fun to use. And Straat just sounds like as if my grandma were to say street :D
@@hah-vj7hc "Appel" also the common form in a lot of dialects, so not always "funny and dated".
Also, in Dutch the spelling is changed throughout history to reflect pronunciation shifts (and sometimes even back again when it doesn't take)
@@Drabkikker German also underwent this change except for the Northern (Low German) and Swiss (Lower Alemannic) variants.
1:20 Both time periods are labelled "1100 - 1500."
I wondered about that too. I think it is only the first label (Middle English) that is accurate.
I noticed that too
@@Rodhern Neither is accurate for either Middle English or Early Modern English. What the dates are accurate for is when the Great Vowel Shift was happening. The way Rob put that in the video is very confusing.
@@aLadNamedNathan Ahh, thanks.
@@aLadNamedNathan well, you are quite a confident fellow for someone who's totally wrong 🙃 the dates are correct for the middle english period. the great vowel shift started near the end of that period, and lasted through 17th century. but don't take my word for it, check any source available.
You missed a key point about the printing press, that it was invented in Germany and there were many Celtic/Nordic letters that don't exist in Germany so the letters weren't available and they just replaced them with ones that did. Hence why "the" was for a while spelled "ye" because Y looks the most like the old letter, but it confused people into thinking it said "ye" and not "the"
Great video. I was reminded of Lord Peter Death Bredon Wimsey, who in one of Dorothy Sayer's stories explains that, though many pronounced his second name to rhyme with "teeth", he preferred to rhyme it with "breath".
0:52 - In my home town there was once a professor who, unlike Otto Jespersen here, DID always refer to "The Great Vowel Shift" as "The Great Vowel Movement". The students in his class were always biting their pencils to avoid breaking out in cackling.
What's wrong with the word "movement"?
@@user-oe1bu5qw1w The phrase "vowel movement" would sound too much like the phrase "bow'el movement", so people avoid it.
He knew exactly what he was doing, just like the teachers who choose various pronunciations of Uranus.
During bridge tournaments, players move from table to table according to the instructions in one of two movements: the Mitchell Movement or the unfortunately named Howell Movement.
Try coaching a soccer or basketball team and ask the kids to "go grab your balls".... resistance is futile...
"Until we mate again" signoff. Ouch.
Still makes me think of the ending of Dr. Strangelove.
Too many business matings these days. It's exhausting.
Lol
As a dutchie I love these kinds of videos, it's fun comparing our pronunciations as well!
One of the best videos in the channel, ever! Congrats, Rob, and thank you for such a nice treat!
11:13 - The acknowledgment that Rob just punned should have been more elaborate. It was so subtle that it almost went over my head.
I caught the pun and chuckled, I actually thought the explanation was redundant, but at least done in a fun way.
Most of my family emigrated from East Anglia to Wells, Maine USA around 1640. My Great Aunt and Uncle lived across the street from us and were like Grandparents to me. They were both born around 1880 and talked with the old "Maine accent". there is a section of Wells that is a raised bog with very little tree growth (unusual for here) of about 500 acres. It has always been called "The Great Heath", pronounced hayth. I noticed many pronunciation and word usage anomalies when I went to elementary school. The teacher was adamant that chimney should be used rather than chimbley. Hark was in common usage at home, mainly telling children to be quiet and listen. A Drain was pronounced dreen, particularly the pipe draining the cellar. A funnel was called a tunnel. A recipe was a receipt. The Maine accent is non rhotic and practically all vowels are pronounced (door is two syllables) something like doe-wah. In the fall at killing time, a beef to be slaughtered was always called "a creature" as in "are you goin' ta kill a creecha this fall?" keep up the good work, I find your postings very interesting.
Thanks for your comment. I find these family recollections about language fascinating.
very interesting, thanks for sharing!
"...a *beef* to be slaughtered" A what now? Tbf, I have a tendency to give animals food names, like calling a pig "Bacon," so just calling it beef instead of saying cow, bull, or cattle, amused me. On the whole, this was most fascinating.
Vey interesting thanks.
@@NotAFanOfHandles Interesting, I used beef to mean bovine. It could have been a Steer, Ox, Bull, Cow or calf, but was still called a Creature in this scenario. A porcine animal, however, no matter what age or sex were called a pig. It seemed to me, as a child that killing a creature was a more serious endeavor than just killing pigs.
I love this channel, and never realized how obscure the spelling is of many of the words I use daily. Keep up the great work!
Rob, your videos take a long time for me because I love to read the added comments. No other channel has so many intelligent and articulate followers.
The way the "OO" graphic moved on screen, I was expecting a different word that starts with "B" and has a double "O". The one about birds with blue feet. 😀
(5:40) Thanks, I just learned a thing about a bird
I had this same thought. "Ohhhhhh I know where he's going with this. 😏" And the "Awwwwe, he didn't go there ☹️"
We were all like: OO 👀
I bet the editor had HUGE fun with this :D
@@JimsMusicLessons I'm not sure I follow, are you referring to The Story of "O"
As a French native speaker, I’ve always been amused by other French speakers saying English is so easy, unknowingly admitting they have no idea how complex English pronunciation can be
It varies around the world. I never understood my hairdresser's English. She was from the Phillipines and had been speaking it all her life.
I find that English speakers are very tolerant of others not quite getting the correct pronunciation, as long as they are getting the point across. A French person can speak English with all the standard French ways of "incorrectly" pronouncing certain words, and English speakers don't care. They find the accent charming, and as long as you understand what the French person is getting across, it's fine. But I've found that French speakers don't give others speaking French the same grace.
@@vbrown6445 An interesting case is Jacques Pepin. His accent when using English is not merely a French accent. He pronounces English words with the sound values the letters would receive in French. He must have had a very bad English teacher--either that, or he stubbornly ignored his English teacher.
@@vbrown6445 As a non-native English speaker, I find annoying that natives never, ever correct my mistakes. They'll let me make the same one 100 times without saying anything. They think it's polite but all they're doing is preventing foreigners from improving. The French may take it to the other extreme, but at least they'll help you get better. I much prefer that.
I was once asked by a native French speaker, " Are you angry?", but after my puzzlement became apparent, we both figured out he was thinking about having lunch!
"The Great Vowel Shift"?!? No, no, NO! "THE GREAT VOWEL MOVEMENT"!
That was an excellent overview of the Great Vowel Shift. Very informative! Thanks, Rob!
There was a little girl Who had a little curl Right in the middle of her forehead And when she was good She was very very good But when she was bad She was horrid
Didn’t Bugs Bunny recite that?
@@andrewjames1366 So did the Goofy Gophers. Warner Bros. seemed fond of that poem. It's actually an old nursery rhyme, though.
I had an English teacher in elementary school whose sole focus seemed to be correcting any student that tried to say the T in often.
Making the language more phonetic seems like a good thing. And changing the spoken language seems more practical than trying to change all the books in print, given that there are always new learners of the language, and the spoken language always changes over time anyway.
@@bearcubdaycare Yes, dear teacher, stop correcting people when they are improving the language.
@@Primitarian There seems to be an issue here about whether to impress standardization or whether to impart education. The more cosmopolitan our ability to understand, the better educated we are.
I think I switch between "offin" and "oft-en" when saying the word "often", though I don't use it regularly.
Our english teachers growing up enforced that "t" and woulda docked you for NOT prnouncing it. "Offin" sounds like slang.
I just discovered your channel Rob, and I have to say it's amazing. I'm slowly going through all your videos. It's great work. Keep it up.
Love your videos, Rob! And I've just subscribed to your podcast, which has been a delight to listen to on my drive to work each day!
In the US east coast, which was settled early -- we still retain vowel distinctions (probably inherited from the UK) that the rest of the country doesn't have. I'm from Philadelphia, and we have some of the fussiest vowel distinctions in the country. When I was in school in linguistics, I had so many grad students coming up to me asking me to pronounce things and then gaping in shock. For example, NONE of the following words rhyme in Philadelphia: Mary, merry, marry, and Murray. And we can tell them apart when other Philly people say them. We raise the vowel in words like "like" and "cider" but don't raise it in "house" or "about," so we have only one-half of Canadian raising. The vowels in words "cot" and "caught" along with "don" and "dawn" are very, very different. We even have an extra vowel that produces a minimal pair for no one but us: "can" and "can." One means "to be able to" and the other is the container you drink soda out of, and I'd need to say them for you to hear the difference, but they are different enough to us to be completely different words. Why did we retain these vowel distinctions and they got lost in the rest of the country? I guess the same reason why many language distinctions disappear -- migration. Lots of people from lots of places all gradually shifted westward and vowel distinctions got smeared out as they went.
I loved my year living in Philly (NavyBase) and love it when I meet that accent out here in Utah
I'm from further west in PA and we have most but not all of those, which is interesting. I don't personally distinguish "Mary/marry" very well (although you have me wondering about my grandparents now) and I don't know what you mean by the raised vowel in "like," but the "can/can" is something that I retain when speaking in a more comfortable register although I've just realized I lost it in formal speech.
I started going through the comments just to say that "cot" and "caught" are homophones to my New England relatives, but AFAIK not in the rest of the country. (Except maybe New York. I'm mistaken New Yorkers for New Englanders more than once in my life.)
@@ZakhadWOW I used to live in Anaheim and remember getting into the elevator in my apartment building, and the guy already in there smiled and said, "How you doing?" and I immediately replied, "Where are you from?" because I know a homeboy when I hear one. Sure enough!
I'm from California and lived right outside Philly for a couple years. I honestly couldn't hear any accent in the people there, but I kept getting asked to pronounce "water." The only accent I ever noticed was the occasional New Jersey accent.
This word shift really messes with my being dyslexic.
English is unkind to dyslexia.
Try German. Almost all of the German words make sense and you immediately know how to pronounce them when you read them for the first time. Some things are also complicated: "s" and "ss" sound the same, "tio" is pronounced "zio" for no apparent reason... But the only *really* nonsensically-spelled words in our language are the French and English words that we use.
@@hah-vj7hc I know German pronunciation and I suggest that FInnish is even more straightforward than that. Despite this, both languages have mile long words, which might turn out a bit of a nightmare even if you don't have dyslexia.
english is only my second language and I'm somewhat dyslexic... I really struggled with this. and then french came on top of that....
@@hah-vj7hc well, but you always know if it's "s" or "ss" by the legth of the vowel in front of it.
As a lass from Oxford that puts 'R' into things, I was sat saying the words with you for how i say it.... we got to " Soften" and I headbutted my desk laughing at Soff-Ten" ..... Though, on another note... If I wrote how I spoke... " We would be having a Glarse of Warter before cutting the Grarse and having a Barth" Side note.... Do people who say " baff " Call it a Fiat Abaff or say it how I do, A Fiat Abarth... how it's spelt? I wonder many word things, I'm so glad of your videos and knowledge.
Northerners can't afford the more sporty Fiat 500 so probably not. Just kidding, they probably do pronounce the Abarth the same but I shall from hereon call it the Fiat A-Baff, at least in my head. As a side-note (thinking of the baff pronunciation) northerners will usually pronounce cafe > caff which always makes me laff. I've done it myself quite a few times...
Thank you, Rob. I’ve been eagerly waiting for an insight into this topic for a while. Great explanations. Keep up the good work.
At 11:15 I laughed so much at “Rob did a joke there”. I don’t know why. It caught me off guard. So sunny. I love your videos. Very educational.
I laughed way more at the Great Vowel Movement! 😂 Rob’s a clever guy!
What a beautiful background for this video! It looks like a lovely place to be
I'm lucky that Berlin has many beautiful little lakes like this.
@@RobWords Beautiful day where you are, Rob. I hope you like living in Berlin
@@RobWordseither Berlin or markeaton Park!!
Thanks so much for this, I have been wondering about/researching this for years! Great video, as always!
Thank you. Again, another entertaining, fabulously informative and (I must say) charming video. At long last someone has explained to me what the Great Vowel Shift was. Or more precisely, what it is. The speed of change is astonishing, and I think is continuing. A few years ago, I returned to live in Aotearoa New Zealand where I was born and grew to adulthood. Then overseas. Soon after my return I was in Auckland in conversation with some young men whom I found difficult to understand. Their accent was not only new to me, it was New. It was a tongue of compatriots who were New Zealand born. But I am sure that when I left New Zealand in the 1970s there was no such accent so removed from the accents I grew up with. It was 'native' in that it is spoken by people born here. Yet it presented vowels, vocabulary, grammar and expressiveness that were new to me. These speakers were children or grandchildren of people who had moved to Aotearoa from various Pasific island nations. Their new English was perhaps derived from some 'standard' English spoken through the New Zealand larynx, from their forebears' accents and from American popular culture song and rhetoric. This rapid creation of a new accent in these islands, supports your suggestion that significant change may be driven by fashion and by migration. Conversely, as the printed word becomes less culturally significant, spoken language becomes less constrained by it. Heard influences, rather than printed text, again gain prominence. Thank you for your wonderful videos.
Could you illustrate how a 'vowel shift' is continuing in Australian, Canadian and USA English, please? Many thanks for your videos.
I don't know much about Australia and Canada, but in the USA there is the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, where "block" is shifting to "black", "busses" to "bosses" etc. The big expert on the topic is Bill Labov; look him up if you're interested.
@@Drabkikker There is a sound change in certain dialects of Australian English (mainly in Victoria, centred around Melbourne), involving the merger of /el/ into /æl/, which has been happening since at least the 1980s and is ongoing. It may spread to Australian English in general.
@@Drabkikker There's also the so called Canadian Shift, described since the second half of the 20th century, involving the lowering of [ɪ] and [ɛ] and the retraction of [æ]. It too is ongoing (the latest study I found dates from 2019, and found that the changes have not yet spread through the population consistently).
@@renerpho Fascinating, thanks!
@@Drabkikker You're welcome
As a Czech, I certainly have a tendency to pronounce silent letters in English, especially those I picked up from reading. Even though I know better, I still visualize the silent letters in my mind (“handsome” being a great example). Since Czech is spelled and pronounced the same, it is a hard habit to let go of. Ask any Czech how to pronounce “salmon” and you’ll see. Ha, ha.
It's even more confusing in some cases: In most American dialects/accents, the L in "solder" isn't pronounced -- we say something more like "sodder" -- while the Brits have hung on to the L in their pronunciation and have a different (the original?) vowel ("sole-dr").
@@doublej1076Pronouncing the l in solder is a 19th century "innovation" in Britain. It never used to be pronounced or for that matter in the spelling. It was one of those cases where a letter were reintroduced by pesky "scholars" who ought to have known better to match Latin cognates when they had already disappeared when the word had been borrowed from French centuries earlier.
Its especially interesting you mention silent letters, because "Czech" is about the only example of a silent z in English and its a mystery why its there - we already have "ch" for that sound. Of course that would have resulted in "chech", further highlighting the mess of English because "ch" at the end of a word is a short "k" - you'd need to be a "Check" to look 'English', which is far too confusing for us! On the "salmon" issue.. We were all agreed that it was pronounced "samon" until Salman Rushdie entered the English vocabulary and suddenly we worked out how to pronounce an "L" before and "M" and wrote a new rule that says that the "L" is silent before "M" unless its Salman Rushdie.
@@methoxy66 The first vowel in "salmon" is also different from the first vowel in "Salman."
What's silent in "handsome" (hanD-suom) apart from the letter "e"?
We have been waiting for this video to come out!
This channel is excellent! The combination of informative content and his smooth delivery makes watching the videos a truly enjoyable experience. Great work, dude!
Can you do a video about the ways American and British pronunciations diverged? You touched on it briefly here and I'd love to see more about that. Great work sir! Love your videos!
Aloominum is particularly irritating from those who chose to destroy english languauge (and yes, I'm looking at you " 'merKa " )
The “murder most foul/vowel” jingle was stupid and hilarious! Loved it!
RubberRoss jokingly said "kuhnees" in his recent video and it really got me. I love the idea of using old phonetic pronunciations as funny emphasis.
Like Python's "silly english k'niggets... 🙂
The silent t in soften makes sense to me as it literally softens the sound of the word. Of course, it would make more sense to drop it from the spelling too, but there's a lot of inertia I think. Maybe this counts as phonological adaptation?
Oh, it's the "Great Vowel Movement" from now on.
7:56 So, is it "con-TRI-Bu-ting" or "CON-tri-byu-ting"????
@@irmafoster3933Con-TRIB-you-ting. He pronounced it wrong.
One of the best explanations of the Great Vowel Shift that I have ever seen. Thank you!
Thank you for such an easy and fun explanation of such a complex topic.
Still one of the best channels! Thank you Rob!
It looks like frequency of use has a lot to do with it too! “Look” is used daily far more than “spook” (which I rarely use), so it will naturally shift to something quicker and easier while “spook” doesn’t. “Look” takes much less effort and time than “Luke”. That would explain why “took” and “book” went with it, but “kook” didn’t. It also explains “often” vs “soften”.
I agree. Another thing that can come out of this is different pronunciations by the same speaker when using different registers. When I speak standard English, I say "spook" with a different vowel than in "look," but when I speak using a lower social register, I say "spook" with the same vowel as in "look."
I’ve always thought English was one of the first to write down and standardize spellings, so it’s shifted far more than other languages. Maybe French also, as they don’t currently pronounce the last syllable of any word!
Great points! Why does "kook" rhyme with Luke, but "cook" rhymes with "book"?
@@4.0gotestreview16 Some consonants have been dropped, but not usually, whole syllables? We retain the "p" in "camp" and the French have dropped it, for example. Some less competent teachers of French or less competent students of French retain that dastardly "p" when speaking French. It does annoy native speakers of French. LOLOL!
Oddly enough, the Most frequently used words are actually the most Resistant to pronunciation change, followed by those that get barely any use at all.
I have to say, your production quality is really good. I've watched several of your videos, enjoying all of them! Good job!👌
Elusive as in it eludes you, not illusive - blame this confusion on the centering of unstressed vowels (: Lovely video and it looks like you guys have really stepped up your editing and production recently!
Really interesting, Rob, well presented and explained. Thank you (from a fellow Derbeian)
As a brain exercise I have taken up online teaching of English. English spelling causes so much confusion, especially when 'ed' is added to a verb to make the past tense. That 'ed' when spoken can sound like a 'd' or a 't' but rarely as 'ed'. One exception being painted. Trying to stop people saying the end as 'ed' is a full time job.
I knew a foreigner who misapplied this rule of English grammar to the word "naked," constantly mispronouncing it as if it were a verb. He was too hard-headed to accept correction.
@@aLadNamedNathan Can't you send him to the recording of naked in an on line dictionary. He pronounced it as "naikt"?
Unfortunately, English requires basically twice as many characters as it has, mostly vowels, if you want it's spelling to be both consistent and not horribly complex. Though a couple of accent markers (indicating primary stress and disambiguating digraphs vs syllable break between two monogaphs) would go a long way towards sorting out a lot of it. There's no saving the '-ough' cluster though.
Also "added" as in your comment
@@laurencefraser (cough, cough until we have had enough)
Rob in full joke mode! "The Great Vowel Movement"! Monty Python! Very entertaining and informative.
Murder most vowel!
A shit joke is always a good distraction. 🙂
I notice a lot of people from the USA pronounce "Arctic" and "Antarctic" as "Artic" and "An(t)artic" (with or without the first "T") - so many I've heard on KZhead, TV shows, movies etc referring to "Anartica" or "Antartica" and the "Artic Circle". Here in New Zealand - which is closer to Antarctica than the USA is - we say "Antarctica".
R. Vaughan Williams hat seine 7. Symphonie Antartica genannt. Er war walisischer Herkunft.
@@jrgptr935 Danke.
Fascinating Rob - thank you so much for introducing me to such a wonderful study of the language I have always used, but had never really appreciated its heritage.
Again you blow me away with words and sounds how u do this and your news job is just amazing. U deserve a raise😂❤
I saw what you did with the double o overlay. I like it 👌🏼
Native English speaker here: I have always pronounced the l in almond, palm, folk. I pronounce the d in handsome (rolling/gliding instead of a stop). I also have a modified b for for words like thumb and dumb (not thum or dum, not thumbuh or dumbuh). I’m not entirely sure why some of these characteristics have been maintained in my accent. I also have separate pronunciations for cot and caught, don and dawn, Mary and marry and merry, but they are usually spoken quickly where most people wouldn’t notice. 🤷🏻♂️
Being so clear about something so foreign, is a testimony to your knowledge. Bravo !! I’m British and have lived abroad for 40 years and it was only when I started to talk to my kids in English that I understood how messed up it all is. Until then I thought is was pretty straight forward. How far from reality I was.
Thanks for this, Rob. In Hartlepool, we pronounce the u in curry the same way as e in Kerry, and we do it with blackcurrant, purple, nurse, etc. I tell anyone not from Hartlepool about vowel shifts. It's interesting that this particular vowel shift is regionally specific
I’m not familiar with the Hartlepool accent, although I’m very familiar with the Teesside accent (my brother having lived in Stockton for many years and raised his family there), I didn’t realise they were so different. The way you describe it, it sounds similar to Scouse.
Scouse does something a bit similar. (Only a bit, I hasten to add! Others will be able to be more specific, no doubt.)
'Contributing' has a different stress syllable here in Nova Scotia than what you pronounced close to the 8 minute mark. I normally hear the stress on TRI.
Same in Australia
In southern africa you hear both.
@@yeoldesoyboy Also the U.S.
Same in old Scotia. 👋🏴
How did he say it? I didn't notice. I say it with the stress as you describe (Eastern U.S.).
Another absolutely brilliant video. I have just started following your podcast
Or what I taught my students in Brittany France: " La grande mutation vocalique". I imposed conversations via cassettes and later CDs to learn at home on a daily basis. These little Bretons looked and sounded like little Britons after a few months. I never took off marks for spelling. I told them not to copy my Canadian accent but unfortunately a few did. One girl said "hass" for house. I couldn't figure it out until I asked myself, how do I pronounce it? /a/. I noticed on visits to Canada that Canadians sounded more "American" than before or was it just they sounded more American to me? Une explication très rigoureuse sur le sujet; Rob! Merci!
I studied english (in France) and I've always struggled to explain the Great Vowel Shift in a few words for me fellow french persons. Thank you for that! I'm going to send this video everywhere! Regarding "weird" (peculiar may be more accurate) pronounciations the french Canadians are really great with French as well (and we have some nice stuff going on in our own hexagon), and it's amazing to do a little bit of history on every of those occurences. Anyway thanks for your videos. Ran into your channel a couple of weeks ago and it's been a very nice ride so far :)
One of the things that I have heard (maybe you will know if it's true or not) is that during one of the World Wars, soldiers from Quebec were in France, and the people from Normandy could understand them. Apparently they were speaking an old dialect. People saw it as an indication of where many of the early settlers came from in France. And of course this was after 150 years of no longer being a French colony so there was an attitude of preserving and different evolution paths between the two countries.
Love this video. It explains the GVS in a straightforward, yet educated way. So well, in fact, the a maths teacher from the Newcastle can understand it. Thank you Rob! PS I do pronounce the T in soften.
Does everybody in Newcastle?
Very nice covering of the gvs. I love these videos you make, especially the etymology videos you put out. If anyone wants a more nerdy video about these shifts and the exact way it happened, I recommend checking out Simon Roper's video on the subject as well (after finishing this one ofc). Rob actually does a much better job in this video about what actually caused much of the gvs than Simon, but simon can explain the phonetic reasoning behind it. It goes into a bit more detail, and also touches on how it affected some other accents as well. Also touching on how and why these shifts happen.
Brilliant! Thank you for this video, because the confusion of spelling vs pronunciation has always driven me crazy. It’s perplexing, yet the reason was … elusive … until now. 😅 Fantastic work, as always!
The word egg is a good example of the influence the printing press had on the English language. In the 15th century, there were two words used in two separate English dialects to represent this particular dairy product: egg and eyg (I think it was spelled like this). When an English printer in London came to the word egg, he immediately chose egg, for this was the word from his dialect. He completely ignored eyg which was used by London residents no more than a mile from his shop. Within 50 years, eyg was no longer seen in documents.
Is "egg" a dairy product? I thought it came from a hen usually or some other female bird. Of course the French have "lait de poule" for "eggnog" so maybe, that led you to think it was a dairy product.
Wasn't it Ei or Ey and plural Eyren?
The word was "ey," not "eyg," and the plural was "eyren." One time, someone who was travelling from one part of England to another attempted to purchase some eggs (or eyren) only to be told by the potential seller of the eggs that she didn't speak French! BTW, the German word for egg is "Ei," and the word for eggs is "Eier."
The version common in southern England was ey, plural eyren, although not unexpectedly there were a variety of spellings. It just about made it into the early Modern English period before dying out. As well as printing, it may have stopped being used as the vowel shift made it pronounced the same as eye.
@@dinkster1729The word dairy apparently comes from an old word for female servant, the dairy being a place that she'd work. At least that's the OED etymology, and another etymology I found.
My late grandfather used to pronounce meat like mate or met. Lot of other words in Scots (Doric) sound to me like pre vowel shift English.
This is so interesting and explains a lot. Thanks Rob.
Thanks Rob for another interesting language video. :-) BTW: your pronunciation of the “soft G” is quite good for a native English speaker. I appreciate that. As you can imagine, that is quite important to me. ;-)
I was brought up in Camberley, Surrey by two people who were immigrant Austrians and one who was from Edgware. I then spent three years in Leicester followed by a year in Snodland. Then, ten years in Brixton and south London. I like this Rob bloke and I find myself subscribing. For counselling.
Nothing to contribute other than I know camberley very well, was down the road in eversley, other side of yateley.
Rob, another great video. Love what you are doing for the English language.
In my native language, Dutch, many of the "ough" words don't have a silent 'gh'; we use the throaty sound at the end of "Loch" there. Enough = genoeg; sight = zicht; cough = kuch; rough = ruig; knight = knecht. Likewise, the silent L didn't disappear.
Excellent video!!! I wish we has this video in college English when we were learning about The Great Vowel Shift!
Another brilliantly understandable explanation of something i didn't know i didn't understand correctly. Thanks Rob, love your channel.
From Ontario (Canada) the 'about' pronunciation 'a-boot' is primarily the East Coast, particularly areas of Nova Scotia. The rest of Canada says 'ah-bowt' ('normal' pronunciation'). Another peculiarity from NS is 'ka-ear' for 'car'.
I was about to say the same thing. I'm born and raised in Canada and pushing seven decades as an oxygen breather and I've NEVER heard ABOOT, though I've always felt it might be heard in isolated pockets of the east coast "for shore". ;-)
Thank you! This misconception is so irritating to the vast majority of Canadians who have never heard ANYONE pronounce 'aboot' except for Americans mocking us in media. Not saying it does not happen somewhere in Canada, but not in most of the country. However we do tend to over enunciate letters as you pointed out, again probably in an attempt to sound less like Americans.
I agree, I've lived in 6 provinces and on both coasts (BC, NS, Nfld) and I've never heard anyone say 'aboot', so the belief that 'aboot' is a widespread Canadian pronunciation is confusing to me. I suspect that it may be apocryphal and many linguists (and comics, media, TV hosts, etc) just accept it as true without actually checking their source material.
I was sad to hear Rob perpetuating a joke about Canadians. Expected him to have done more research and a better job at the pronunciation of a Canadian 'about'.
@@rothanarae I thought his Canadian pronunciation was pretty good (for a non-Canadian). It was the 1st time the ABOUT thing made sense and didn't feel like I was being mocked with a boot. As a Canadian, when I say it about rhymes with out. ... And sounds like ow.
Thanks for this. It's the most easy-to-follow explanation of the Great Vowel Shift I've seen and really helped me to understand it. Talking about mixing things up, did you read that scientists working in the Antarctic are starting to develop their own accent?
Terrific explanation beautifully presented. Outstanding production!
I don't think I had previously heard of the GVS, much less had it explained so well. Thank you, Rob! ❤
I heard of it a couple years ago when I googled "why did Americans lose our English accent?" The article I read basically agreed with Rob and said that we (Americans) didn't lose it... It was the British who changed.
@@VictoriaKimball Actually, it depends on which feature you look at as to whether it changed in British or in American. Both dialects sound simultaneously old-fashioned and futuristic at the same time to the other one. Language change is generally random, but once a change is introduced, it can trigger a predictable chain reaction.
Fashion is a thing. In french the "r" sound changed during the 20th century , the former one being more and more associated with people from rural areas (the so called "culs terreux"). You can here it clearly comparing songs from the thirties and songs from the fifties.
The present uvular r has existed at least since the 18th century. It was not regarded as standard until after the Revolution and only gradually spread to the greater part of France.
The first time I’ve seen the GVS explained clearly. Thank you!
My pleasure, Peter! Thanks for the support.
Thank you. This explains so much. I remember in 1st grade, being called on, to spell the word snow. How are you supposed know how to spell something? Oh, remember 25 words a week, for the rest of your life. Think this is why I like math so much more. It builds on a logical structure.
Something I've never seen discussed (not that I go out of my way to find it I guess) is why only English? The Plague affected most/all of Europe. I would think people would be moving around just the same, frequently in multilingual kingdoms and empires. The printing press would have come into play in all these places eventually. Were there cultural differences that led to spelling standardization before the printing press? It also kind of makes sense that England would have more of the language fashion going on since they had the language split between nobility and everybody else after 1066. But I'd also expect language differences like that to be happening all over Europe too (like pre unified, pre strong king France). Maybe something about the Holy Roman Empire being over this large swath of land of various cultures and languages, and having to handle communication for that already, insulated a lot of Europe from similar changes??
Before Great Vowel Shift (GVS) South-Eastern English dialects and South-Western Netherlandish-dialects were very similar and mutually intelligible. GVS was very likely triggered by English elites switching from French to English in the 14th century. They of course had French accents. Lower classes copied this originally French accents in the next centuries. To this day French and English speakers are both incredibly bad in speaking modern Dutch. They are simply unable to create some of the basic sounds in their mouths. French and English speakers make exactly the same errors.
These sorts of changes are not unique to English. What was unique was that they happened at the same time that the invention of the printing press was causing spellings to be standardized.
@@roodborstkalf9664 No way were they mutually intelligible, except to a very limited extent. They might have been 500 years earlier. In addition, the number of monoglot French speakers in England in 1300 was very small. Most of the nobility were bilingual or even English speaking well before that. And, you may note French speakers are incredibly bad at speaking English too - again being unable to produce some basic sounds.
@@harrynewiss4630Lots of Francophones in my area (Eastern Ontario) who sound like they only speak Canadian English when they also sound like they only speak Canadian French when they are using either of their 2 languages. Very bilngual individuals.
@@aLadNamedNathan It just seems so odd that it affected English so much. I'd expect the printing press to induce a lot of languages to start standardizing spelling. My understanding is it even wasn't that strange to have the language of the nobility vs the peasants, especially with a lot of conquering happening across language zones. I know in part translating the Bible into German was part of the start of standardizing German, but it didn't screw with its spelling (in the end result anyway). Said another way, given these factors, I'd expect there to be at least one other well known language will spelling problems like English, and I'd expect a joke from its speakers that it's bad, but at least it's not as bad as English!
Fantastic video! Thank you so much, Rob.
Rob, you're very good at this - I'm always smiling by the end of your videos. 👍👍
Hooray! Thank you.
Great video. The thing about the vowel shift where vowel sounds are articulated higher up and further forward in the mouth, is still going on. Young people in Australia are tending to pronounce the "o" sound, for example in the word "no", much more forward and higher up, which rhotacises the vowel so that it glides into a slight "r" sound at the end.
"Noone says sofTen"? How to pronounce it else? sofen? Well, then I use the wrong? pronounciation, because I say sofTen. But I am German. We usually read the letters. Except the word is lend from another language. Then everybody is confused. Where is the C in perfect coming from? Because we also have it in perfekt and of course we pronounce it. I really appreaciate your videos because I ofTen discover words I know but I never noticed how close they are related. In this video it's sight (as you spoke it) and Sicht (the german word for sight, which is exactly spoken as you did) and meat, spoken as Mett, which is the german word for spiced raw chopped pork which you find on a Mettbrötchen, a well known dare for American tourists and actually very tasty with some onions on top.
Looking online tells me that the English word ultimately comes from Latin "perfectus". The French reduced it to "parfit" which was then imported to England, the C from the original Latin was added back at some point. American English does this more often, for example the "unnecessary" U in "colo(u)r", "neighbo(u)r", etc., was removed by making the words more closely resemble their Latin roots while the British kept them. Except for "glamour", which doesn't come from Latin so there's no older form to revert toward.
I say soften without the 't', rhymes with other words like 'listen' and 'fasten'.
Find these very, VERY interesting! New subscriber here....thanks, Rob.
Yes thank you Rob!
Welcome!!
I have been an English Language teacher for almost 10 years. Your videos provide me with all those questions that I have never been able to answer before. Thank you.
Great job, sir!!! Loved the video.
Very interesting! Could you do a video on the New Zealand vowel shift? How did English 'Fish and Chips' turn into New Zealand 'Fush and Chups' amongst many other examples. Their vowels are all over the place. Is it because they migrated midway through the GVS, or did they all just gradually forget how to pronounce words once they were halfway round he world?
From Scottish accents of settlers.
Aussies don't say fush and chups, and we're halfway around the world too. Kiwi pronunciation is just weird 😅
The Great Vowel Shift was long over before any Brits started moving to New Zealand!
My daughter told me that a prof she was babysitting for got the comment on her evaluation form from a student "I would prefer a prof who speaks without a foreign accent". The prof was from New Zealand and taught here in Ontario, Canada. I asked my daughter if this prof was, perhaps, racialized and she snapped at me, "No!"
@@dinkster1729 The journalism department of the university I attended used to put out a newspaper five days a week. The April Fool's issue was always a joke edition. One joke that recurred year after year was that in the coming year, engineering classes would be offered in English. It was true that most of the engineering professors there were from China or India, and they were notoriously difficult to understand.
Your videos are the perfect balance for me. The graphics are novel and attractive. The history and information is palatable in the small bites given. I am less ignorant, now.
Well said! I agreed wholeheartedly.
I had long attributed the confusing spelling to the printing press "fixing" the spelling while the pronunciation was still changing, but I had not thought about the other possible contributing factors. A nice presentation.
You would think that if the printing press was the driving factor, that all words would be shorter. OUGH would be chopped!
This is so interesting, thank you very much. In German there happened something similar called "Lautverschiebung", I looked it up: "consonant shift". It's good to see how we've become to what we are now.