19. Pronunciation (Part-3)

Such pronunciation changes are a regular feature of language.

Sometimes they occur with the speed of centuries, sometimes with seemingly

hell-for-leather haste. They appear from time to time in all languages for reasons

that no one really understands.

German had one not long after the departure of the Angles and Saxons to

Britain, which resulted in the division of German into High and Low varieties. In

the German shift, northern speakers came to places's where before they had put

t's, and to put f's where previously they had employed p's. These changes were

of course too late to affect English, and thus explain the differences in many

modern English and German words, such as water and wasser and open and

offen. Such changes are by no means unique to English or even the Germanic

languages.

Latin underwent a prolonged series of changes. In the fourth century, to take one

example, the Latin centum (hundred) began to be pronounced in various ways—

a fact reflected in the modern French cent, "sent," Spanish ciento, "thiento," and

Italian cento, "chento." By such means did the Romance languages grow.

In England the Great Vowel Shift, as it is generally and somewhat misleadingly

called, happened later, roughly around the time of Chaucer. Textbook

discussions of the shift can sometimes leave us with the impression that people

pronounced their vowels in one way up to a certain date and then suddenly, as if

on a whim, began pronouncing them in an altogether different way. But of

course it was never as simple as that. Many of the pronunciation changes

reflected changes that had begun centuries before in the time of King Alfred and

some of them are not complete to this day. (Shove and move may one day be

pronounced in the same way; it would make sense.) So, although it is true to say

that these constituted some of the most sudden and dramatic changes English

had ever undergone, we should not lose sight of the fact that we are talking about

a period that spanned, even at its most rapid, a couple of generations. When Chaucer died in 1400 , people still pronounced the e on the end of words.

One hundred years later not only had it become silent, but scholars were evidently

unaware that it ever had been pronounced. In short, changes that seem to history

to have been almost breathtakingly sudden will often have gone unnoticed by

those who lived through them.

No one knows why this vowel shift happened. As Charlton Laird has succinctly

put it: "For some reason, Englishmen started shoving tense vowels forward in

their mouths. Then they stopped. And they have remained stopped. Nobody

knows why they started or why they stopped." For whatever reasons, in a

relatively short period the long vowel sounds of English (or tense vowels as

Laird called them) changed their values in a fundamental and seemingly

systematic way, each of them moving forward and upward in the mouth. There

was evidently a chain reaction in which each shifting vowel pushed the next one

forward: The "o" sound of spot became the "a" sound of spat, while spat became

speet, speet became spate, and so on. The "aw" sound of law became the "oh"

sound of close, which in turn became the "oo" sound of food. Chaucer's lyf,

pronounced "leef," became Shakespeare's life, pronounced "lafe," became our

life. Not all vowels were affected. The short e of bed and the short i of sit, for

instance, were unmoved, so that we pronounce those words today just as the

Venerable Bede said them 1,200 years ago.

There were other changes as well—most notably the loss of the Old English

sound x, the throat-clearing sound of the ch in the Scottish loch or the German

ach. The loss of this sound from English meant that others rushed to fill the

vacuum, as in the Old English word burh (place) which became variously burgh

as in Edinburgh, borough as in Gainsborough, brough as in Middlesbrough, and

bury as in Canterbury.

Before the shift house was pronounced "hoose" (it still is in Scotland), mode was

pronounced "mood," and home rhymed with "gloom," which is why Domesday

Book is pronounced and sometimes called Doomsday. (The word has nothing to

do with the modern word doom, incidentally. It is related to the domes-in

domestic.) But as with most things, shifting vowel sounds were somewhat hit or

miss, often because regional variations disrupted the pattern. This is most

notably demonstrated with the "oo" sound. In Chaucer's day in London, all

double o words were pronounced to rhyme with the modern word food. But once

the pattern was broken, all kinds of other variations took hold, giving us such anomalies as blood, stood, good, flood, and so on. Most of these words were

pronounced in different ways by different people from different places until they

gradually settled into their modern forms, although some have never truly

settled, such as roof and goof, which some people rhyme with goof and others

pronounce with the sound in foot. A similar drift with "ove" accounts for the

different sounds of shove, move, and hove.

Since obviously there is no one around who heard English as it was spoken in

the time of Chaucer and Caxton, how do we know all this? The answer is that for

the most part we cannot know for sure.

Most of it is based on supposition. But scholars can get a good idea of what

English must have sounded like by looking at the rhymes and rhythms of historic

verse and by examining the way words were spelled in letters and other snatches

of informal writing. In this respect we owe a huge debt to bad spellers. It is from

misspellings in letters of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries

that we can be pretty certain that boiled was pronounced byled, that join was

gine, that merchant was marchant, and so on.

From the misspellings of Queen Elizabeth we know that work was once

pronounced "wark," person was "parson," heard was "hard," and defer

was"defar," at least at court.

In the same period, short vowels were often used interchangeably, so that not was sometimes

written nat and when sometimes appeared as whan. Relics of this variability

include strap and strop, taffy and toffy, God and gad.