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The Great Vowel Shift in the English Language is one of the most important events in the evolution of modern English phonetics and pronunciation. It occurred towards the end of the Middle Ages and carried on into the English Renaissance, culminating in the seventeenth century when vowel usage was more or less consolidated. The event was likely caused due to a complex combination of socio-economic factors as well as cultural and technological change, but its effects are of more immediate concern. The Great Vowel Shift is responsible for creating many of the rules of written English and the peculiarities in pronunciation as compared to the written word. One of the first poets in the English Language, Geoffrey Chaucer, was at the very head of this shift. His poetry helped consolidate the writing conventions in English and, thanks to his meticulous use of poetic forms, has helped preserve many of the phonetic features of English at the time. This essay uses the ‘General Prologue’ to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in order to appreciate how pronunciation and spelling have changed since the beginning of the Great Vowel Shift.
It should be noted that English prose and poetry has not always been copied and transmitted faithfully according to the original. Quite often, scribes altered and changed certain aspects of the text for various literary or cultural reasons and the texts available today are not always faithful renditions of the originals. McIntosh (1974) shows that the scribal system in late Medieval England was quite unique. Each scribe ‘stamped’ each copy with their own personal style (McIntosh 1974:603). They modernised spelling and even went so far as to alter the syntax or grammar of the text in order to make it more ‘readable’ (according to their own standards). Such alterations helped encode some of the shifts in vowel pronunciation within texts themselves. However, one of the features which would not have been altered is the rhyme scheme. In works like Canterbury Tales, the rhyme scheme forms a link between older conventions for encoding sounds and more modern ones. By studying how the rhyme scheme works, it is possible to understand how vowels were pronounced in the late Middle Ages.
Most of the changes altered fully bounded syllables such as the ‘i’ in ‘bite’ or syllables which lacked an onset like ‘ou’ in ‘out’. Syllables which lacked a coda or had an ‘r’ in the coda, like the ‘our’ from the word ‘licour’ (from the first line of the ‘General Prologue’ changed only slightly or, sometimes, not at all; however, the change could take on very different forms. This suggests that much of the change which occurred during this period was a ‘response’ of sorts to the coda within syllables. A study of the rhymes used in this section of Canterbury Tales seems to confirm this idea. Returning to the word ‘licour’ (which translates to ‘liquor’), it is seen that it is rhymed with the word ‘flour’ (meaning ‘flower’). In this case, the same /uː/ syllable changed into /aʊ/ in ‘flower’ (with the additional /w/) and an /ə/ in ‘liquor’. This large difference between pronunciations shows that the onset of syllables played a huge role in the Great Vowel Shift. The glottal plosive, /k/ of liquor caused the the nucleus to change towards a monophthong, whereas the lateral /l/ in flower caused the nucleus to change into a diphthong. This process is known as ‘diphthongisation’ – where a simple monophthong is changed into a diphthong due to the action of the onset.
The explanation given above actually jumps a few steps since the great vowel shift occurred in several phases over a period of nearly three hundred years. As mentioned earlier, Chaucer lived at the very beginning of the Shift and lived long enough to have just got a glimpse of the second phase of the shift. Before shifting to /aʊ/, the original /uː/ would have first shifted to /ou/ in the first shift, then to /ɔu/ in the second shift before it finally settled on the modern pronunciation of /aʊ/. It is also possible, but somewhat unlikely, that ‘licour’ and ‘flour’ were intended to be eye-rhymes, which would explain how ‘licour’ turned into a shwa in modern English. However, it is probably a better explanation to attribute this change to the effects of the onsets and the codas of each of the syllables.
Another example of how the /r/ altered the general way in which vowels shifted is the ‘breeth’ and ‘heeth’ in Chaucer’s time, both of these syllables would have /eː/ as the nucleus, but in modern English, ‘heeth’ has remained unchanged in its pronunciation, though its spelling has changed into ‘heath’, whereas, ‘breeth’ has changed into /ɛː/ with, the exact same spelling change – breath. Pinpointing the exact reason for this uneven change is difficult but it seems that it must rest with the /r/. The peculiarities of the English Language are likely due to its unusually varied heritage from numerous different language families. It seems to be more than mere coincidence that the Great Vowel Shift occurred almost at the same time that the German language was undergoing similar changes. It is also worth noting that Chaucer was well acquainted with such changes and perhaps even used them in his creation of a standard English.
Chaucer is often called the father of English literature because he drew together all the disparate forms of colloquial English and created a standard literary language. His works are therefore the ideal starting point to understand how modern English grew out of its medieval ancestor. Chaucer’s works highlight some of the most important changes which took place during the shift and help modern readers appreciate how much the English Language has changed.
Work Cited
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. New York: Broadview Press, 2012. Print.
McIntosh, Angus. "Towards an inventory of Middle English scribes." Neuphilologische
Mitteilungen (1974): 602-624. Print.
Wolfe, Patricia M. Linguistic change and the great vowel shift in English. Vol. 42. California: University of California Press, 1972. Print.
