The Great Vowel Shift, or A Brief History of English

Language is alive. It shifts and changes; pronunciations and spellings morph throughout time. English is no exception.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from dot com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast I'm Crazy and I'm Holly Frying.
At the end of our recent episode on the Honey War,
we read a listener mail from an Egyptologist about honorary

(00:22):
transposition and hieroglyphics, and that led us into this little
digression about how hard it can be to figure out
how to pronounce words and languages that nobody speaks anymore.
And I made this random aside about how I had
thought way back when Holly and I first got on
the podcast, I thought about doing an episode about the
Great vowel Shift. We have never gotten nearly so much

(00:45):
response to any other random, weird thing we said on
the show as we have about the Great vowel Shift.
I was astonished, Were you astonished? Who knew? I had
no idea how people were like rapidly excited of this content. Yeah,
it was this astounding number of people that asked us
to talk about it, which we still we got another

(01:06):
email over the weekend after this had already been like
the outline had been written and everything. When I mentioned
on Twitter that an astounding number of people had asked
more people asked after that, only one person asked that
we not do that, So I'm sorry that person is outvoted. Um,
I just I can't get over how many people have

(01:27):
asked for it, because this was really at the tail
end of the show. To be candid, we know there
are people who have checked out by that point, like
we know there are a lot of people who don't
listen to listener mail. Uh. But every possible way people
have to talk to us, they did to ask us
to talk about the Great Vowelshift. So the eyes have it.
Today We're going to talk about the Great vowel Shift.
But because it is, like I said, a little Inside Baseball,

(01:50):
thirty entire minutes about vowels, I think would be a
little much for most people. So we're going to put
it in the greater context of the history of English,
of the English language, and that comes with its own caveat,
which is there are whole books about the history of
the English language. My alma mater had a semester long
literature class about it, and it wasn't even just like
a like, it wasn't a one level literature class. Um.

(02:15):
And there's like there's a podcast called the History of English,
and that has run for sixty seven episodes so far.
So obviously, we are not going to talk about every
single thing there is to mention in the history of English,
and we're not going to get too deep into the
very technical linguistic terms that are used to describe a
lot of it. What we are going to talk about
is how the history of English runs alongside a greater story,

(02:40):
which is basically all about conquering people and being conquered.
So the history of English begins before the arrival of
Germanic peoples, who came to be known as the Anglo
Saxons in the British Isles. The Anglo Saxons arrived in
what is now England and Wales from the European continent.
Some came peacefully, although others definitely arrived as invaders and conquerors.

(03:03):
According to be the Venerable, the Anglo Saxons included three
distinct groups, the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jews. Their
arrival in England started toward the middle of the fifth century,
and the language that developed in the wake of their
arrival is now known as Old English. Its roots come
from a number of Germanic languages, and their dialects, with
the primary contributors being West Germanic, Old Frisian, Old Franconian

(03:29):
and Old High German. Before the arrival of the Anglo Saxons,
the people of the British Isles spoke a variety of
Celtic languages. It's also possible that some people spoke Latin,
since the Roman Empire had governed parts of Britain for
about three hundred and fifty years from the year forty
three to the year four ten. It's not completely clear, though,
how well Latin survived after the end of the Roman

(03:50):
rule in what the Empire referred to as Britannia in
for ten. Nor should all these different Celtic speaking people's
be lumped together in one cultural group. The idea that
the British Isles were once inhabited by a monolithic cultural
group called the Celts is really an eighteenth century invention. Yeah,
all these different Celtic speaking people's had their own unique cultures,

(04:12):
in their own unique ways of living. They were not
one sort of people known as the Celts. Several of
the Celtic languages that existed in the British Isles when
the Anglo Saxtons arrived which are classified as the insular
Celtic languages still exist today. Welsh, Scottish, Gaelic, Irish, Cornish,
and Manx, which is spoken in the Isle of Man,
are all examples of insular Celtic languages. Celtic languages were

(04:35):
once common on the European continent as well, but apart
from Breton, which was really an insular Celtic language that
was carried from the British Isles back to Brittany, Celtic
languages didn't survive well on the continent beyond the fourth
or fifth century. While several insular Celtic languages survived today,
some thanks to intentional efforts to preserve them, all of

(04:55):
the continental Celtic languages are extinct. Insular Celtic languages didn't
wind up adding very many words to English, though. This
is one reason why if you do speak English but
don't speak a Celtic language, trying to sound out a
word from a Celtic language can be a completely baffling experience.
It's possible that the insular Celtic languages had an influence

(05:17):
on grammar and pronunciation in Old English, but when it
comes to the individual words and the letters and sounds
used to make them. There really was not a lot
of sharing going on. Yeah, I'm sure there's some like
a hilarious video somewhere that English speakers trying to pronounce
Welsh not only does the like, the spelling of Welsh

(05:39):
words doesn't follow a pattern that English speakers recognize really well,
the letters themselves are pronounced differently than they are in English.
The English saxons and their languages were firmly established in
England by the sixth century, and there are lots of
English words in use today that came from these Germanic languages,
although they generally had different spellings and pronunciations at the time.

(06:02):
A lot of these words are really short and they
describe everyday objects and things. So baker, beer, sheep, bird, eel, book, father, world,
and right are all examples of English words that exist
today that we're also part of. These Germanic Old English words.
The words for England and English also come from these
Germanic roots. There were plenty of longer, more complex words

(06:25):
in Old English as well, but the shortest words used
for the most everyday things and ideas were the most
commonly used and consequently had the most staying power. In
the evolution of the language. More than half of the
thousand most common words in Old English still exists in
the English language today. Conversely, about eight percent of the
thousand most common words in English today came from Old English,

(06:49):
which to me adds a delightful layer to Randall Monroe's
book Thing Explainer, which is a book that explains complicated
stuff using the only, only, the one than most common
words in English. So I like the idea of reading
that but pretending that you're reading Old English instead. But
in spite of the simplicity of the Old English words

(07:11):
that remain in English today, a lot of Old English
was kind of complicated in a different way than how
today's English is complicated. In Old English, verbs could change
their position in the sentence for emphasis or grammatical reasons,
and a number of inflections were used to change the
meanings of words. Inflections still exist today. Adding an S
to a noun to make it plural as an example

(07:33):
of inflection, as is adding an e D to a
verb to make it in the past tense. But Old
English had a lot more inflections for a lot more
reasons than modern English does, and applied them to a
lot more parts of speech. Words in Old English were
also often gendered in a way that they are not
in modern English. Germanic languages also aren't the only root

(07:53):
of Old English. In the late sixth century, so a
hundred and fifty or two hundred years after the Anglos
Action Acts, an invasion of England began. Christian missionaries began
arriving in the British Isles as well, and they brought
with them a language that was not entirely new to
the region, which was Latin. Latin began to influence Old English,

(08:14):
and the Latin alphabet was also used to write Old English,
with the addition of a couple of characters to represent
the th sound, the most famous being the character thorn.
The first Latin English glossaries date back to the year
seven hundred, and some scholars argued that this is really
the birth of Old English as a language. We still
have some literature that was written in Old English around today.

(08:37):
The most famous pieces are probably the epic poem Beowulf,
which is one of my favorite things, and for pros
the writings of King Alfred the Great. The next big
changes to the English language were also the result of
invasions starting in the eighth century Scandinavians made their way
to England, all the folks we broadly classify as Vikings,

(08:57):
and while there are definitely English words that have Norse roots,
most of this influence on the language itself didn't come
along until a bit later, after the next big shift
in the language, which we're going to talk about, but
first we're gonna have a word from a sponsor. So
Old English was spoken in much of what's now known
as England and Wales from roughly the sixth to the

(09:18):
eleventh centuries, and from there it gradually shifted into Middle English,
which is one of the languages associated with the medieval
period in Britain. As we talked about at the top
of the show, Old English was the language invaders and
colonists from the European continent brought to the island after
the end of the Roman Empire. In Britain, the shift
into Middle English was the result of invasions as well.

(09:42):
Middle English came about thanks to influences from the Normans,
the Vikings, and Christian missionaries. The Norman invasion was famously
marked by past podcast subject the Battle of Hastings, which
took place in ten sixty six and The Battle of
Hastings was also documented in the Biou Tapestry, which was
also another past podcast subject. Over the next one years

(10:04):
or so following the Battle of Hastings, English went through
a number of shifts and revisions. Some scholars refer to
this period as transitional English because so many different influences
on the language we're still making their way through how
people really spoke and wrote. A big shift was in grammar.
The number of inflections dropped dramatically, particularly when it came

(10:25):
to nouns, and a lot of the more complex, lengthy
words from Old English that didn't survive until today were
replaced by words from other languages. Basically, the language is
being spoken by the various peoples who were invading England.
William the Conqueror, who invaded at the Battle of Hastenings
spoke Norman French, and the ruling class that he brought
with him did as well. Because of this French influence,

(10:48):
for a time, much of the literature written in England
was largely an Anglo Norman. Anglo Norman also became the
language favored by the nobility, the court system, and the
schools as well, some of them those famous works of
literature from the Middle Ages were written in Englo Norman,
including Tristan and Eiswold and the Lay of Marie de France.
The next most popular scholarly language in England was Latin,

(11:11):
thanks to the influence of Christian missionaries. Because of this
prevalence of both French and Latin, and the fact that
French and Latin have a lot in common, sometimes it's
really hard to tell whether a word that exists in
English today really came from French or Latin. This is
particularly true because some French words are borrowed from Latin,
and then the English words were borrowed from French. Regardless, though,

(11:33):
following the Norman invasion, lots of words with French or
Latin roots made their way into English, including peace, animal imagination,
and prison. The Viking raids into England pretty much stopped
after the Norman invasion. However, by the time they did,
there were a lot of people in England, particularly Northern England,
who spoke one of the early Scandinavian languages that we

(11:54):
that would eventually grow into Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and the like.
None of these languages gained a long term foothold in England,
but lots of English words come from Scandinavian roots that
were started during this time. As with Old English words,
they're still spoken today. Many of them are short, one
or two syllable words that name everyday objects and ideas.

(12:16):
Some of the nouns from Scandinavian. Scandinavian origins include cow, bull, root,
and skin. Verbs include take, scare, flit, and want. The
pronoun they also has Scandinavian origins. Eventually, all of these
influences coalesced into a language that if you can read
modern English, you can probably read as well, although it

(12:39):
may be a bit more difficult. Uh The words themselves
tend to be familiar, even though their spellings and pronunciations
are often inconsistent. By the thirteen hundreds, Middle English had
become the favored language in England and literature was being
written in it. Some of the most famous works in
Middle English include the Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawaine and The
Green Night in the Book of Mark Juri Kemp, which

(13:01):
is of course the subject of a past podcast. The
first complete English translation of the Bible was in Middle
English as well. On a brief digression about Marjorie Camp
that was one of the first episodes that I researched
for the podcast UM and I had chosen to do
it because it was something that I already had enough
familiary familiarity with that I felt like I could get

(13:22):
into it and not be starting from absolute square one.
And one of the first podcasts I ever researched, and
I went to get my college copy of the Book
of Marjorie Camp off of the bookshelf, and I opened
it up and it was in Middle English, and I
was like, oh, I do not I do not have
time to puzzle my way through Middle English for this podcast,

(13:42):
and so I had to order a Modern English version
of it. One of the reasons that I found it
difficult was that Middle English was in a lot of
ways not very standardized. Surviving manuscripts from the era vary
a lot from one another, even when they are literally
copies of the exact same piece of literature. In addition
to lots of inconsistencies in spelling and grammar, there were

(14:03):
specific dialects that existed all over the British Isles, and
many people still spoke a Celtic language as their primary
or only language during this time. Towards the end of
the fifteenth century English had its next big shift, and
we're going to talk about that after we have another
pause for a sponsor break. After Middle English came perhaps

(14:24):
not surprisingly, Early Modern English. The King James Bible and
Shakespeare's plays are both in Early Modern English, and as
with Middle English, if you can read Modern English today
things that are written right now, you can probably read
it too, but it might take your brain a little
bit more work. In a lot of ways, the shift
from Old English to Middle English seems a lot more
dramatic than from Middle English to Early Modern English, and

(14:47):
that makes a lot of logical sense. The transition from
Old English to Middle English was brought about, in large
part by the influence of multiple other languages on Old English,
but the shift from Middle English to Early Modern English
was a lot more about standardizing a language that already existed.
English vocabulary continued to grow, but mostly through the inclusion

(15:07):
of more words from languages people were already familiar with,
or other romance languages that had similar roots. This was
the rise of pedantry in the English language. Different scholars
set about trying to set rules specifically for English and
the nitpicking other writers who broke those rules. It's a
trend that continues to annoy editors today. Various writers, including

(15:30):
seventeenth century writer and critic John Dryden, decreed that English
should follow the rules of Latin and then effectively applied
Latin structure to English, so rules like don't end sentences
with prepositions are made up from during this time to
try to make English conformed to Latin rules. Alexander Pope
and Jonathan Swift did a lot of writing about the

(15:51):
need to standardize English as well, and consensus among linguists
today is that you can try to permanently affix a
language all you want, but as long as people are
actually speaking it, it will continue to evolve. Beginning in
the middle of the seventeenth century, people started proposing that
there be a formal academy of English to document the

(16:13):
language and make sure it stayed quote pure. This didn't happen,
but through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, dictionaries did flourish.
English gradually became standardized. Perhaps inconveniently, this exact same time
that people were writing dictionaries and standardizing rules for how
to speak and spell English was happening at the same

(16:33):
time as people were completely shifting how they pronounced things right.
At the same time that people were literally documenting how
to spell, people were starting to say things differently from
how they were spelled. To be clear, the shift did
take hundreds of years to play out. Pronunciations were shifting
back in the twelfth century, but just as the language
was finishing that shift into the sixteenth century, people were

(16:56):
writing dictionaries based on the old spellings of words that
no longer matched how we say them. And a piece
of this was the great vowel shift, essentially, where people
pronounced long vowels moved up and back in their mouths.
And the reason that Tracy had described this as being
a little too inside baseball is because it's really difficult

(17:17):
to both research and describe without a working knowledge of
linguistics and phonology. We're going to assume most of our
listeners don't have that, and I'm so I'm going to
take an extremely simple, basic approach to explaining this. If
you ever had to memorize the prolog to Chaucer's Canterbury
Tales in Middle English, you probably remember the first lines

(17:39):
which start wanted that up roll with his store of Sota,
the draft of March Hath person to the rota, and
in modern English, that's when April with his shower sweet
with root. The drought of March has pierced to the route.
So during the great vowel shift, for example, Rota became
pronounced his route after became April, or to look at it.

(18:03):
With some other words, the word height like how tall
you are today would have been pronounced more like heat,
and feet, the things at the end of people's legs
would have been pronounced fet and hate like really disliking
pedantry would have been pronounced more like hot. And these
were not the only shifts in pronunciation that went on

(18:24):
in early modern English. There are whole other vowel pronunciations
that used to be unique but now sound identical. People
also stopped pronouncing a lot of consonants, as you could
probably hear in the Canterbury Tales example. But the early
modern period is also when we stopped produced pronouncing the K,
the G, and H in the word night, so we

(18:46):
don't think that would have been a much more complicated
word um. We also stopped saying the bee in lamb
and the tea in thistle. Basically a lot but not all,
of the complete discrepancies between how we spell things and
how we say them in English arose in early modern English.
Apparently for all the listeners at home who cannot see

(19:06):
the outline. This is where I also had discrepancies in typing.
There are a lot of theories for why all of
this happened. There are scholars who blame migration that followed
the Black Death. Others just say it's a natural drift
in how we pronounce things and it's still going on today.

(19:28):
The general consensus, though, is basically it's a mystery. We
don't really know why everybody changed how they said their vowels.
There are also some naysayers among linguists who say that
this whole thing is extremely exaggerated and that it wasn't
nearly as pronounced or important as people uh position it
as today. And to be clear, people did figure out

(19:49):
the vowel shift by examining things like verse like what
words rhymed with what other words uh, and misspellings and documents,
with the idea that if you were spelling something that
way it sounded, the misspelling that you make would change
over time as the vowel pronunciation shifted. So to some
extent are very understanding of these pronunciations here is kind

(20:10):
of an educated guess. Towards the end of the Early
Modern period, people continued to be very concerned with standardizing
and perfecting English. In the eighteen hundreds, professionally printed materials
became increasingly standard in their spelling, grammar, and style, but
people's personal papers continued to be all over the place.

(20:30):
People have made much of the fact that Jane Austen's
handwritten drafts are full of what are considered errors, but
really that's how ordinary non pedants wrote at the time. Yeah,
people were much more casual in their personal correspondence than
the increasingly standard professionally printed work. From the end of
the Early Modern period, English progressively became more and more

(20:51):
like the language that we recognize today. It's probably safe
to say that most people find Jane Austen and Charles Dickens,
who were writing in Late Modern English, easier to read
than William Shakespeare or Alexander Pope, who wrote in Early
Modern English, and much much easier than Marjorie camp who
was writing in Middle English, and a million times easier
than the Epic of Beowulf has written in Old English,

(21:13):
which I'm not sure I could make out without a dictionary,
I definitely could not. While the development of English into
a modern language is most about who invaded England and
then an effort to standardize the result, English today is
also defined by where England went after that. The most
obvious is the variations in slang, pronunciation, and dialects and
places that were or are still part of the British Empire.

(21:36):
English does not sound quite the same in Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales,
the United States, India. In each of these places, English
also has its own loan words that are unique to
the languages being spoken there before English arrived. But it's
not just about the nuances and what's considered standard English
and all of these different countries. There are also creoles

(21:59):
and dialects that have involved that have evolved in tandem
with English all over the world. As an example, in
the America's and the Caribbean, there are English based creoles
that evolved as a result of the Transatlantic slave trade.
They draw from English West African languages and sometimes sometimes
the language of native peoples who were living in the area. Guala, Jamaican, Patois,

(22:22):
Cayman Creole, and Bahamian Creole are all creoles that draw
from English, African languages, and sometimes each other. Australian Creole
and pit Current are examples of creoles that draw from
English and native people's languages in the Pacific, pretty much
anywhere English speakers of colonized There are also dialects of
English that have their own rules about grammar and pronunciation.

(22:45):
One example is African American Vernacular English, which is a
lot in common with Southern English dialects. So that is
an extremely, extremely condensed history of the English language of
thanks in part to how many people wanted us to
talk about the Great Belshift. If you are a linguist,
this was probably the stuff that is way, like, you know,

(23:07):
way more stuff than what we just said. I suddenly
found myself mired in gosh, what things am I really
pedantic about? Usually only one? Well, what's really funny, not funny,
It's more annoying to me is that sometimes we'll put
like let's say, for example, we'll put an article on
our Facebook page, and the article will end the headline

(23:27):
with a preposition, and someone will come and make a
comment about how one should not end sentences with prepositions
and then I will provide numerous sources about how that's
actually fine, and then nine of the time the person
just doubles down into how that that is the right way.

(23:47):
And you should make sure that not to apply made
up to rules to English. And I'm like, but you
are complaining about is a made up rule? Yeah? Like,
there definitely great value in learning how to speak and
write well. These are important skills to have in life.
But then you also really should think about how the

(24:10):
way that people talk, in the language that they use,
in the way people speaking right also reflects where they
are from and their upbringing, how much education they actually
had access to, their class, their ethnicity, Like, there's a
whole lot that goes into how people talk and right. So, uh,
pedantically nitpicking strangers on the internet about how they spelled

(24:30):
something wrong is perhaps not the best use of anyone's
time unless you are literally that person's English teacher, and
the thing you are nitpicking on the internet is literally
their class assignment that they did to you. Uh, you know,
for some people that's their windmill that they tilt at.
I don't I find and I think you probably do

(24:53):
as well. Like people are surprised that I'm not one
of those. They're like, but you're an editor, and I'm like, yeah,
but if he had it long enough, you realize that
even really fabulous, well educated people make typos and mistakes
when they're putting together manuscripts like it, did you understand
what they were getting it? Like you could at the
other stuff if you're doing it, you know along the

(25:14):
guidelines for like publication that that's usually my criteria are
was the meaning understood? That's only that's a criterion somebody
is going to write about anyway. I have some listener
mail that's not about pedantry fantastic. It's about the Honey Lore,
which is the same episode that inspired this whole podcast,

(25:36):
and it is from I am not sure if she
says her name Tamara or tamoraw. I have known people
who spell their names this way and have said it
both ways. And she says this might be a little
late because I tend to hoard episodes for a few
weeks before listening to them. But Lowbourn Bogs, the Missouri
governor with the dispute with Iowa, has another claim to fame.
In eighteen thirty eight, he issued Missouri Executive Order forty four,

(25:58):
which made it legal to drive have Mormons out of
the state and if necessary, kill them, and then she
quotes from it. We therefore agree that, after timely warning
and receiving an adequate compensation for what little property they
cannot take with them, they refused to leave us in
peace as they found us, we agree to use such
means as may be sufficient to remove them. And to
that we each pledged to each other, our bodily powers,

(26:20):
our lives, fortunes, and sacred honors. Basically, it's legal to
steal their land and kill them if they object. This
order was an effect until nineteen seventy six hundred and
thirty seven years later. Classy man thought you might be
interested in that tidbit of information, uh, and then send
some thank you's and some other cool stuff, So thank
you so much, Tamara. Tamara was one of several people

(26:42):
who wrote about Missouri Executive Order forty four UM, which
we didn't mention in that episode for several reasons. One
of the reasons is that episode was selected because it's
it's actual events are kind of comical. There are plenty
of other things that were going around in the world
at that time that we're not comical. And there were

(27:03):
also plenty of things that we're going around in Missouri
and Iowa that we're not comical, but that particular thing
is kind of a comedy of errors, and we had
been in a series of dark episodes when that one
came out, So, uh, the reason we chose that story
when it was to share something that had a little
bit more levity in it, which was why we didn't

(27:24):
get into all of the other ancillary things that you
could talk about that we're horrifying and awful. Um, but
I did want to mention it since we did get
several emails from folks um, mostly calling Governor Bogs a jerk,
which suits. So you would like to write you would
like to write to us about this or any other

(27:44):
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(28:04):
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(28:24):
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(28:45):
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