For just the second time since my blog's inception, I'm pleased to welcome a guest contributor. The post below - written by good friend, fellow musician, and published author Alan Struthers - fits critical bell curve criteria, i.e., it's brief and borders on the nerdy. But it also stands apart from my day-to-day musings with its semi-scholarly whiff. Language geeks: Please comment on this post; helps Alan and me to know we're not alone in our nerdiness. Thanks.
Just for fun, I've been researching the Great Vowel Shift, which occurred from the mid-fifteenth to the late sixteenth century, roughly from Chaucer to Shakespeare. OK, maybe that doesn't sound like fun to you, but it is a huge mystery with few theories to explain it.
For some reason, all the English vowels changed during that period, "shifting" to new positions in the mouth. For example, the sound of "i" moved from "eee" to "aye", that is, moving from the back of the mouth to the front. (Say these sounds and feel what happens in your mouth.) All the vowels moved in the mouth and took on new pronunciations. In addition to this "shift", vowels generally became diphthongs, where the mouth moves while sounding the vowel. This didn't happen in any other language, nearby or remote - not Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Swedish, etc.
This all made the earlier English dialect (or dialects) virtually incomprehensible to speakers of the new one in the short period of 150 years or less. Put this into a contemporary time frame and imagine the Gettysburg address - delivered in 1863 - being gibberish to today's listeners.
So why did the shift happen in England, and why then? In Inventing English (2007), scholar Seth Lerer posits the following: During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the upper classes of England shifted from French to English as their chosen “prestige” language. The sounds of English may have changed then as part of a larger process of replacing a lost prestige language with a prestige dialect – a dialect not keyed to region but to social class, education, or wealth.
Will our great grandchildren see a different seismic shift in English grammar or pronunciation? Perhaps today's common grammatical usage or new forms of class or wealth will foment great linguistic changes in the future. Or maybe not.
Alan, what an interesting insight. We easily recognize "toney" language that signifies upper class or wealth when we hear it. But I've never stopped to think about how those affectations came about, or what the future holds in terms of future language evolution. Thanks for the new perspective! Kim
ReplyDeleteKim; Thanks for jumping in and words of support for Alan's insight.
DeleteMy nerd credentials (or nerdentials) are such that I even sounded out the vowel "i" in both ways. I never knew about this dramatic shift but it makes sense. When I see a movie that takes place in the 1940's I think the way the actors speak sounds distinctively different than how we speak now. And the regional accent thing is always fascinating. Thanks Pat for providing space for this interesting topic. And thanks Alan.
ReplyDeleteRegina; I love your neologism "nerdentials". And thanks for the comment; we word nerds have to stick together.
DeleteHello Alan. I enjoyed reading your, guest, Blog Post. It raises interesting questions and I am glad to read the answers you've provided as to why these event/changes/twists took place and/or happened. One thought that has crossed my mind from time to time is why are there different accents. I don't necessarily refer to different languages, although I could expand my question to include that. But more to the point I'm raising, when speaking the same language - English in this case - why are there different accents, different ways of pronouncing the same word, different ways that the same word, even when pronounced in a similar way, sound so different in England - for example - then in the US. And even within the same 'accent' there are variations depending on where one lives in the same country and, as you have pointed out, which 'class' they may be from. Also, there if you look at the UK as a whole, there are some countries where English sounds like a completely different language. So much so that there are times when, in films for example, subtitles are not only used, but are necessary.
ReplyDeleteNo matter the reason, your post did raise an interesting topic.Thank you for that.
Be well,
Bob
Bob; Thanks for the comment and support for Alan's post.
Delete