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.