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Great Vowel Shift

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Re: Great Vowel Shift

#121

Post by Veen »

tabtab wrote: post #114
Aromasin wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny enough, this has almost become the common British pronunciation of most "hard t" words. It's quite common for people to say "a bottle of water" like "a boh-ell of wah-er", or "butter" like "buh-ah. The sound comes from the back of the throat instead of the tip of the tongue.

I had the impression such is considered "lower class" talk, for lack of a PC way to describe it. Please hear me out before giving me negative points. If you are "educated", then you are "supposed to" pronounce the middle constantans, as skipping them is considered "lazy". I'm not making a value judgement, but reporting that this is what parents often tell their kids in private . All things being equal, parents want t…

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.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#122

Post by ljm »

gchucky wrote: post #3

The vowel shift is one of the major reasons why Shakespeare's poetry doesn't rhyme when spoken with modern English. There was a rather fascinating video that went around awhile back of a father and son demonstrating the changes.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s

It's fascinating how much of this holds out in various accents across the UK, most particularly outside of London and going up north. My mother and grandparents on her side have similar-ish pronunciation of some words with their thick Lancs accents. Not quite farmers accents but still quite archaic in sound sometimes.

(Imagine other examples, like pronouncing 'couch' a bit more like 'cooch')

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#123

Post by User23 »

lottin wrote: post #108
User23 wrote: post #57

In German e is a, and i is e. It really is striking.

It isn't striking for speakers of German nor for speakers of Romance languages. These are the vowels that these letters originally stood for in the Latin alphabet, and they still do in many languages. But English obviously isn't one of them.

I’m a native speaker of both English and German and it was striking to me when I was learning to write.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#124

Post by yesenadam »

I thought this fascinating video lecture[0], History of English - The Great Vowel Shift by Jürgen Handke, explains things very well, using the diagram and by his demonstrating all the vowel sounds in question. It even explains the origin of some other modern English accents.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyhZ8NQOZeo

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#125

Post by yesenadam »

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.

> Vowel shift is a term of art in linguistics

Aside: I see "term of art" everywhere on HN lately. Why?! What does it add to saying "Vowel shift is a linguistics term" or "a term in linguistics"? Why do people want to sound like patent lawyers? Am I missing something?

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#126

Post by canadianfella »

pdevr wrote: post #81

Wow. I was (again) reading about this whole thing last week. Lot-cloth, Father-brother, cot-caught, Psalm by itself... If you are interested to know more, take a look at the way native speakers of other languages utter "a" and "o" and their variations. Fascinating, to say the least.

Cot and caught are different to you???

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#127

Post by chc »

yesenadam wrote: post #125
eindiran wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Vowel shift is a term of art in linguistics Aside: I see "term of art" everywhere on HN lately. Why?! What does it add to saying "Vowel shift is a linguistics term" or "a term in linguistics"? Why do people want to sound like patent lawyers? Am I missing something?

"A term in linguistics" is imprecise — it's also a term outside of linguistics. The phrase "term of art" means basically "I know that you think you know what this means based on the words, but it is a special defined term that means something particular in this field." It is generally used to correct someone who seems to be viewing a term of art as a common English phrase, so the precision is useful.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#128

Post by jcranmer »

inglor_cz wrote: post #90
gxqoz wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

McWhorter is a linguist (as well as a political commentator). His argument isn't that English is easier because people already speak it natively. Instead, English lost a lot of its complexity (especially around suffixes) during the Viking invasions when it was taken up by adult speakers. This doesn't mean that learning the language is easy--no language really is. And English has some things that make it harder to mas…

From a Slavic perspective, the really complex thing about English grammar is the sequence of tenses. Having spoken English for almost 30 years by now, I am still not sure if "X has died" or "X died" is correct, or in which context. But the other direction would be worse. Languages like Czech, with its 20+ classes of declension, must be a true nightmare for any English native speaker to learn.

> Having spoken English for almost 30 years by now, I am still not sure if "X has died" or "X died" is correct, or in which context.

Okay, strictly speaking, this is a distinction in aspect, not tense. But colloquially, tense, aspect, and mood are all referred to as "tense", especially since the conflation is present in most Indo-European conjugation patterns.

"X has died" is the present perfect. The perfect aspect is kind of like the past tense in that it is referring to something that has happened. Indeed, the past perfect ("X had died") is usually described as "the past of the past". But in keeping the tense in the present, the present perfect means that the past occurrence has relevance to the present. This can carry a few connotations. It can be a recent past, especially if you use "just" as an infix (c.f., "X has just died"). Or it can highlight the consequences of the event having occurred (e.g., "Our lord has died. What will become of us now?"). In any case, the speaker is drawing the listener's attention to the connection between past and present when they use the perfect aspect.

So which is correct? "X died" you would expect to find more in a biographical context or maybe a novel. "X has died" would be common in a news report, or someone informing you that a loved one died not too long ago. Which is more correct in a given scenario can usually be informed by the dominant tense in surrounding text; after all "X has died" is the present tense, despite conveying an action that happened in the past. If there's not enough text to dictate a tense, then it's often the case that either form will end up being acceptable--it just sets the tense that will be used.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#129

Post by gugagore »

tabtab wrote: post #114
Aromasin wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny enough, this has almost become the common British pronunciation of most "hard t" words. It's quite common for people to say "a bottle of water" like "a boh-ell of wah-er", or "butter" like "buh-ah. The sound comes from the back of the throat instead of the tip of the tongue.

I had the impression such is considered "lower class" talk, for lack of a PC way to describe it. Please hear me out before giving me negative points. If you are "educated", then you are "supposed to" pronounce the middle constantans, as skipping them is considered "lazy". I'm not making a value judgement, but reporting that this is what parents often tell their kids in private . All things being equal, parents want t…

It's no big secret that different social groups exhibit language variation, and that while there's nothing inherently lesser about certain dialects, they are nonetheless coded as e.g low or high status.

You might feel a lot more comfortable talking about this subject and find useful alternatives to your scare-quoted words if you skim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociolinguistics

Also due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection ,I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English is a fascinating and accessible example. A terrible summary: dropping the R is lazy (dropping anything is "lazy"), but at the same time sounds British and therefore fancy to some American ears. But other people, to avoid laziness, add Rs. But then their speech can sound low-status in some cases too.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#130

Post by dmitriid »

jadinvt wrote: post #105
mason55 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still have many English words I know (and use correctly in writing) that I'm not sure how to pronounce. Do you mind sharing some examples? As a native English speaker, I'm so curious! Do you think that if you heard them without seeing the word you'd realize what the written form was? Or might there be words where you know the written form and the spoken form and don't realize it's the same word?

epitome. I knew what the word meant written and spoken, but didn't realize it was the same word until well into adulthood.

This reminded me of "catastrophe". I'm still unsure :)
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