This chart roughly represents the places where the "long vowels" are articulated: Say "ee" (or "beet") and "o" (or "boat") in succession and you may be able to feel the movement of your tongue from front to back. To understand how English changed (not why no one knows) one must first note that vowels are articulated in particular parts of the mouth we make the sound in Modern English "deep" with our tongue forward and high in the mouthr, and the sound in Modern English "boat" with our tongue lowered and drawn toward the back of the mouth and the jaw relatively low (open). (His alphabet and the work of other language reformers provides us with our best evidence for the pronunciation of English in his time). In 1569 John Hart (in his Orthographie) went so far as to devise a new phonetic alphabet to remedy what he considered a fatal flaw in our system of language. To many it seemed that the pronunciation of English had moved so far from its visual representation that a new alphabet was needed, and in the sixteenth century we have the first attempts to "reform" English spellings, a movement still active today. The Great Vowels Shift changed all that by the end of the sixteenth century the "e" in "sheep" sounded like that in Modern English "sheep" or "meet". Consequently, one can read Chaucer's long vowels with the same values as in Latin or any continental European language and come pretty close to the Middle English values. It had much the same value as written long e has in most modern European languages. For example, Middle English "long e" in Chaucer's "sheep" had the value of Latin "e" (and sounded like Modern English "shape" in the International Phonetic Alphabet ). Old and Middle English were written in the Latin alphabet and the vowels were represented by the letters assigned to the sounds in Latin. This is due to what is called The Great Vowel Shift.īeginning in the twelfth century and continuing until the eighteenth century (but with its main effects in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries) the sounds of the long stressed vowels in English changed their places of articulation (i.e., how the sounds are made). But the "long" vowels are regularly and strikingly different. And the short vowels are very similar in Middle and Modern English. The consonants remain generally the same, though Chaucer rolled his r's, sometimes dropped his aitches, and pronounced both elements of consonant combinations, such as "kn," that were later simplified. The main difference between Chaucer's language and our own is in the pronunciation of the "long" vowels.
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