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Great Vowel Shift

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Re: Great Vowel Shift

#31

Post by anticristi »

gxqoz wrote: post #21
anticristi wrote: post #15

Any non-native English speakers feeling like: So is that why we need to suffer a lingua franca that does not map 1:1 spoken and written? This must be the world's largest tech debt. :)))

John McWhorter has argued a few times on the Lexicon Valley podcast that although English has many problems (especially spelling), it's not a terrible lingua franca. Many complexities from other languages do not exist in it. Obviously, any artificial language is going to be much simpler. But these have never caught on for a variety of reasons.

I don't know John McWhorter, but is this the "second languages are hard" argument? I tend to get annoyed when people compare the relative difficulty of learning a language they spoke 1636518 hours vs ... 18 hours.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#32

Post by jccooper »

anticristi wrote: post #15

Any non-native English speakers feeling like: So is that why we need to suffer a lingua franca that does not map 1:1 spoken and written? This must be the world's largest tech debt. :)))

Well, that, and no one wanting to update the orthography. Though speaking of lingua franca, that language also has a very outdated orthography.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#33

Post by Robotbeat »

ngokevin wrote: post #16

Here's what it'd look like (taken from Reddit): "The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English…

You still need c for “ch” so perhaps, like Indonesian, you can just use “c” in place of “ch.”

Oh, and Indonesian is my favorite lingua franca. Super easy to learn for anyone and also simple, phonetic spelling.

I had only ever learned Indo-European languages (ie English, Spanish, French) and a bit of Japanese (also unrelated to Indonesian), but I was able to pick up a useful amount of conversational Indonesian in about 3-4 weeks. Indonesian is an Austronesian language (actually a standardized variant of Malay) and totally unrelated to my mother tongue (American English), yet it was the easiest thing to pick up. Sounding out new words in Indonesian is actually easier than English to me.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#34

Post by Umofomia »

anticristi wrote: post #15

Any non-native English speakers feeling like: So is that why we need to suffer a lingua franca that does not map 1:1 spoken and written? This must be the world's largest tech debt. :)))

Changes to written representation of languages tends to be much more conservative compared to the changes in the spoken languages they're based upon. This is often due to the desire to preserve continuity in the ability for people to gain literacy without having to relearn a new system and retranslate all works that were written in the previous system. This generally lasts until the difference between speech and writing becomes bad enough to hinder literacy, at which point script reforms may happen. Many of the more "phonetic" writing systems encountered in continental European languages were due to the fact that they had relatively more recent script reforms that made spellings closer to how their words were pronounced in their modern languages. Written English, on the other hand, still tends to conserve spelling that reflects older pronunciations.

An example of a language that has it worse than English is Tibetan, which hasn't had a script reform since 800: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btn0-Vce5ug

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#35

Post by CogitoCogito »

anticristi wrote: post #15

Any non-native English speakers feeling like: So is that why we need to suffer a lingua franca that does not map 1:1 spoken and written? This must be the world's largest tech debt. :)))

> So is that why we need to suffer a lingua franca that does not map 1:1 spoken and written?

I think the fact that it is a lingua franca is one of the main reasons keeping any spelling reform from occurring actually. It's in far too wide-spread use and there isn't any centralize authority that would do the spelling reform. Maybe take solace in the likely fact that it written English and spoken English will probably only be _more_ different as time goes forward. In other words, you have it easier than all future generations.

Also as much as spelling matching pronunciation is a convenience, it isn't really necessary. The variety of spoken Chinese languages using the same characters is greater than the spoken romance languages. Maybe English really slowly becoming more character-like over time. There are languages that can undergo spelling reforms, and there are languages people actually use.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#36

Post by mywittyname »

ngokevin wrote: post #16

Here's what it'd look like (taken from Reddit): "The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English…

This is cute, up until the point where it starts reaching and makes changes which are important for the sound of the language.

The e in many words isn't silent, it's a modifier. Kit and kite are different words. "th", "z", "w", and "v" are all really different sounds. While certain accents (or children) do occasionally conflate them, in basically every case, it's technically incorrect. Zebra, Webra, Vebra, and Thebra are all totally different words to a native English speaker.

I'm absolutely behind the idea of simplified English where spelling and pronunciation match. But that's a lofty goal, as first one would have to canonize English, which is basically impossible at this point. Then they'd have to tackle homonyms, like cot and caught (assuming canonized English has these pronounced the same).

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#37

Post by aasasd »

Moreover, there wasn't just one or a few shifts: they happen all the time and there were plenty of them. Apparently a big discovery in etymology (in 19th century iirc, and I forget the guy's name) was that words mostly don't change pronunciation individually, but the same parts in different words change in the same way. Which allows to track those changes over time and thus backtrack how modern words should've sounded in the past.

This is why folk etymology usually misses the mark—since it focuses on single similar words that in fact often turn out to be unrelated. Also afaik spelling is irrelevant for etymology, at least until the very recent times.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#38

Post by jcranmer »

bloak wrote: post #17
echelon wrote: post #4

The article doesn't explain what evidence we have of this. How do we know this happened?

It's a good question. It turns out that linguists can discover quite a lot about how some languages were pronounced before audio recording existed. I got some insight into this by reading the first chapter of an academic book on the pronounciation of Latin where there was a summary of the different kinds of evidence that can be used. Unfortunately I don't have the list to hand so the following is just my random brain…

> * the pronunciation of descendent languages, especially when there are lots of them, or lots of different dialects

It's worth calling this out as being one of the key elements of historical linguistics. Establishing genetic relations between languages requires proposing systematic sound shift laws that can explain why cognates sound the way they do, and this means that cognates in modern languages may not bear much resemblance to each other (English five and Sanscrit pankan are cognate yet share 0 sounds!). For example, there's a rule in the Germanic languages that shifts /k/ to /h/, so words like Latin "centum" instead become English "hundred" or "canis" to "hound" [1].

Now these pronunciation shifts often have caveats in them, such as shifting only before certain kinds of vowels or consonants. These restrictions can give you some clues as to why certain words seem to undergo a change while other words with seemingly similar pronunciations didn't. In Proto-Indo-European, this leads to the notion that there are several consonants (specifically, laryngeals) which are no longer present in any modern Indo-European language but whose existence in the original is responsible for sometimes shifting vowels that otherwise appear somewhat anomalous in descendant languages.

[1] To be clear, Latin is not the initial word and English is not the final word. I'm just using Latin to illustrate a word closer to the original Proto-Indo-European pronunciation and English to illustrate what the Proto-Germanic pronunciation shifts towards.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#39

Post by KineticLensman »

gxqoz wrote: post #20
ngokevin wrote: post #16

Here's what it'd look like (taken from Reddit): "The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English…

The Economist had a recent article on why spelling reform never really gains traction. Basically, those in power to change it have no incentive to do so: https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/04/10/why-its-...

Yes. In British English, one problem with any sort of spelling reform is that the pronunciations of many words have significant regional variations. For example, in a Southern English accent, words like Bath and Castle are pronounced with a long vowel (almost as if they were spelt 'Barth and 'Carstle') compared with the much shorter Northern English versions ('baf', 'cassl').

To pick a particular pronunciation-based spelling of words would therefore be to prefer one region over another. This would at least trigger a monumental North vs. South argument, assuming that the plans survived the inevitable knee-jerk reactions / incredulity of the usual media suspects.

Probably best if we stick to arguing about daylight saving time, or changes to the format of cricket matches.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#40

Post by Kranar »

anticristi wrote: post #15

Any non-native English speakers feeling like: So is that why we need to suffer a lingua franca that does not map 1:1 spoken and written? This must be the world's largest tech debt. :)))

Any lingua franca will end up deviating in pronunciation from how it's written. For example, Finnish is said to have very shallow orthographic depth (the technical term for this phenomenon), but you can imagine if people from across the world began speaking and writing Finnish that over 100 years you'd end up with different accents and different variations of the original Finnish. The language would branch and merge and branch in unpredictable ways as it gets incorporated into various cultures and you'd end up with a situation similar to English today.
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