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Great Vowel Shift

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Re: Great Vowel Shift

#221

Post by danans »

tmccrary55 wrote: post #219
adamrezich wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The typical American "nearly silent" one you are describing tends to be more of a flapped /ɾ/, by the way. is often the same. yes, exactly! also out here in South Dakota we specifically pronounce the "t" in "Dakota" as a "d," I've noticed.

Midwesterner here but if I try to say Dakota with a t sound, I feel like I'm doing a British accent or something.

Also originally a midwestern. I've noticed that I and others with the accent also put a compensatory breathy h on the end of words like Dakota, and hence pronounce it "Dakodah". Often this results in a devoicing of that second "a". I've never seen any studies on that though.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#222

Post by danans »

fuzzer37 wrote: post #148
adamrezich wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The typical American "nearly silent" one you are describing tends to be more of a flapped /ɾ/, by the way. is often the same. yes, exactly! also out here in South Dakota we specifically pronounce the "t" in "Dakota" as a "d," I've noticed.

Is that the same thing as "D-Troit" verses "Duh-Troit" for Detroit? That's one of my favorites.

The pronunciation "dee-troit" is just local slang meant to sound folksy. It's used by sports announcers and singers, and for comedic value. Most of the time people in the area pronounce it the same way as the rest of the country pronounces it.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#223

Post by audiometry »

Sadly the article doesn't explain how we know vowels were pronounced differently back then. There was no voice recording obviously. Did they have some phonetic system that we can use to reproduce their pronunciation.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#224

Post by hollerith »

audiometry wrote: post #223

Sadly the article doesn't explain how we know vowels were pronounced differently back then. There was no voice recording obviously. Did they have some phonetic system that we can use to reproduce their pronunciation.

We know that German, Swedish, etc, descended fron the same old language that English descended from, and the pronouciation of those languages is very similar to the pre-shift pronounciation of English.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#225

Post by citizenkeen »

westoncb wrote: post #216
jacobolus wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To start, “idiomatic” is an adjective while “term of art” is a noun. The word “idiom” in the sense you are quoting refers to the whole language/dialect/way of speaking, not one word. The sense of “idiom” meaning one phrase (maybe shortened from “idiomatic expression” or something?) does not mean the same thing as “term of art”, but is more like a common expression in a particular language / dialect. It does not have…

And there’s what I was looking for :) I did overlook that ‘idiom’ applies to a full language/dialect. I think you’re overstating your case though when you say “It does not have the sense of a specific technical meaning for a word, distinct from the ordinary definition”—since jargon is a synonym for one sense of idiom and idiomatic is less specific in the group/individual distinction (and yes it’s an adjective but you…

A lot of things are jargon that are not terms of art. When I was practicing law, a lot of people in my legal circles would jokingly refer to their spouses as their "domestic associates". That's not a term of art, but it is lawyer's jargon or an idiomatic expression.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#226

Post by blahedo »

audiometry wrote: post #223

Sadly the article doesn't explain how we know vowels were pronounced differently back then. There was no voice recording obviously. Did they have some phonetic system that we can use to reproduce their pronunciation.

There are a lot of pieces of indirect evidence. They include:

* poetry that has a rhyme scheme, so you know that two words rhymed for the author

* puns and wordplay (Shakespeare is overflowing with this kind of thing) that only work if words were pronounced a certain way

* misspellings or variant spellings, which before the typewriter era would be almost entirely sound based (i.e. unlike typoes in general)

* borrowings into other languages, which generally are "frozen" at the time of their borrowing and from then on start mutating by the rules of the other language

* related languages with cognate words, if you can devise a coherent set of sound-shift rules to reconstruct the shared ancestor-word and the intermediate forms along the way

* complaints from the older generation about how kids these days are mispronouncing words (these are always fun, and usually come with specific, if informal, descriptions of both the old and the new pronunciation)

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#227

Post by optimuspaul »

eindiran wrote: post #118
kindall wrote: post #93

They really missed an opportunity by not calling it the Great Vowel Movement

Vowel shift is a term of art in linguistics, so I'm not sure the pun would be worth it.

Seems like linguistics is the perfect arena for exploiting puns. Term of art I think not when they miss a perfect chance for artistry.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#228

Post by sethhochberg »

User23 wrote: post #59
mbroncano wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is lovely, thanks for ‘ze laf’. One minor note, it reads much more like Dutch to me :)

As someone who speaks both English and German natively, I can say Dutch makes my brain hurt whenever I hear it. It’s like my brain can’t pick which neural pathways to use and the dissonance is awful.

Even as a native English speaker who speaks no German, I find being in The Netherlands to feel a lot like the part of my brain that is hearing a conversation and trying to tune in is working at native speed, but the language parsing part can't make any sense of it.

Sometimes when I'm in parts of the world where I'm surrounded by other languages I don't speak, I find I'm almost automatically tuning out people speaking them around me. That doesn't happen at all with Dutch.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#229

Post by ggm »

Interesting how in "micro" sense we know people knew it was happening ("young people today.." nothing changes) Yet, its a 300 year process.

One of those "I was there" -no, you weren't things. Like sea level rise. You see a bit of it. The totality is a story which spans generations. Nobody owns all of it.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#230

Post by brigandish »

cleansingfire wrote: post #170
Veen wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is (or was) considered "lower-class" to drop your Ts in the UK. But these days, it's not fashionable to talk like Boris Johnson, even if you went to Eton, so many upper-middle class people emulate aspects of "lower-class" speech, including the glottalization of "t" when it's followed by an unstressed syllable (like water). Even someone as indisputably posh as Prince Harry will T-glottalize on occasion.

Not being posh has been fashionable before. A fashion for dropping terminal g existed the upper classes in the 1920's UK. Dorothy L. Sayer's Lord Peter Wimsey did this, and it was fascinating to hear this affectation in the 1970's BBC adaptations with Ian Carmichael. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/no-g-men-frank-mcnally-on... Also, there is a backlash against Received Pronunciation as inauthentic. Now I enjoy BBC…

> Now I enjoy BBC announcers with regional accents, unlike the voices I heard on BBC in the seventies and eighties.

I agree. The downside of the loosening of the old standard is heard in the number of actors who mumble through their lines. I wouldn't want to go back to a time when RADA enforced a kind of RP but I would like them to focus just as hard on diction.

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