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Great Vowel Shift

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Re: Great Vowel Shift

#161

Post by Koshkin »

keiferski wrote: post #24
gxqoz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

English is a great lingua franca IMO because of its inherent decentralization and willingness to accept new words. There is no academy regulating its use, as is the case with French and Spanish.

To be honest, I still wish it were Spanish, which is easier to learn/read and pronunciation of which is somehow easier for most people (except for native English speakers, as I've noticed).

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#162

Post by coolreader18 »

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 funny, for at least the first example, original pronunciation just sounds like Hagrid from the Harry Potter movies, which is especially interesting considering that's intended to be a less formal/"lower class" accent. Reminds me of something I heard once that the modern american accent is actually closer to the british accent at the time of the revolutionary war, and it's the british accent that's changed more since then. No idea if that's actually true, but it was really interesting when I heard it.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#163

Post by zabzonk »

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

Poetry does not have to rhyme.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#164

Post by ajuc »

kaesar14 wrote: post #140
ajuc wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is one for Polish but I think English speakers overestimate the power such bodies have over people :) The only power they have is influencing the way kids are taught at school. Everything else changes by social pressure and exposure - most media choose to follow the new convention and people get used to it over time. The changes are very gradual - the only big one I remember was in 90s - changing how "not" was…

So the only power such bodies have is being able to influence the entirety of the next generation of the speakers of the language? That's surely some amount of power that nobody holds whatsoever on the English language. Israel was able to use the educational system to revive a millenia-dead old language, that's quite a lot of power.

I meant the direct influence would only be noticeable after decades, but because of media and social pressure after a few years most adult people switched.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#165

Post by hunter2_ »

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?

> I see "term of art" everywhere on HN lately. Why?!

Probably a combination of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon and virality (meme).

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#166

Post by Kranar »

keiferski wrote: post #24
gxqoz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

English is a great lingua franca IMO because of its inherent decentralization and willingness to accept new words. There is no academy regulating its use, as is the case with French and Spanish.

All languages are decentralized regardless of regulation by official government bodies.

The role of regulation is mostly a legal role employed by countries that use a civil legal system. Most English speaking countries use a common law legal system and so interpretation of words is fairly fluid and subject to interpretation by the courts. Civil law does not have this kind of flexibility and room for interpretation, so courts will make use of regulatory bodies to uniformly interpret language.

This is why almost all countries with a civil law system have a regulatory body, while countries with a common law system do not.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#167

Post by simonh »

kebman wrote: post #104

I'm amazed! Late Middle English ‘boat’ sounds just like modern Norwegian ‘båt.’ :p I heard the stories that Scandinavians could go to Britain and it would only take a short while to get used to the language. Kind of like Norwegians going to Denmark today. In writing Danish and Norwegian is almost the same, but it takes some getting used to the pronounciation. There's a fantastic dialogue illustrating the similarity o…

My mother’s family is from the Durham area in the north east so I’m very familiar with the broadly Geordie accent. To me Norwegian sounds a bit like German spoken by a Geordie.

It’s not really surprising considering that region of England used to be colonised by “Danes” and was called The Danelaw before the Norman conquest, as against the south Germanic tribes that settled southern England. I suppose the Norman french influence peters out the further north you go.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#168

Post by lebuffon »

bluGill wrote: post #97
CogitoCogito wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

To be considered a competent reader of a standard newspaper you need a 6 years of education in English, while only 5 in Spanish. I understand Japanese requires 9 years of school for the same feat (I'm don't know how to verify this claim, but it seems reasonable). There there is a very real cost to not mapping spoken and written languages: kids need to spend more time in school learning basic reading skill - time that…

An old book "The Fifth Generation Fallacy" (Unger) addresses this somewhat.

As I recall it speaks about the desire by the Japanese leadership of the time to build AI translation and related it to the challenge of full literacy in Japanese due to the requirement of learning 4 alphabets. Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji and Romanji.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#169

Post by bwanab »

perardi wrote: post #106
smnrchrds wrote: post #14

Canadian English is going through a vowel shift right now. The shift is much smaller than the great vowel shift, but still notable. https://www.macleans.ca/society/life/in-the-midst-of-the-can...

Huh, glad that is real, and not just my ears. I’m an American, recently back from 2 years in Toronto, and the Toronto accent is just not the stereotypical Canadian accent that I imagined I’d hear. Far less Minnesota, a bit more New Jersey.

Go to Calgary for that stereotypical Minnesota - with a bit of Texas for fun.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#170

Post by cleansingfire »

Veen wrote: post #121
tabtab wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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