Think John Goodman, or the old “ Bill Swerski’s Superfans” skits on Saturday Night Live. The Great Vowel Shift has been joined by the Northern Cities Shift. Around the Great Lakes, from Syracuse to Milwaukee, a population of about 34 million people today has been giving English short vowels their first systematic change in a thousand years. Short vowels, those without vestigial “-e” syllables, kept the older pronunciations: bed, mat, bit, cot.īut not anymore. Then the long vowels changed, and then the e’s became silent ( mete sounds like meet, soon joined by meat). What happened was that non-silent e’s made the preceding vowel long: in bit and bite, mat and mate, and other such pairs, the first vowel had the same sound but was longer, and the e’s were pronounced. We all had to learn that silent e’s change the preceding vowel sound, but historically, that’s backward. The whole Silent E thing is an offshoot of the Shift, too. All this flux took place just when spelling was being regularized, so written English preserves, if that’s the right word, the chaos. The cluster “ough”- cough, rough, though, through, ought-went completely haywire. Ireland was less affected by the Great Vowel Shift, which is why Yeats doesn’t rhyme with Keats, and why other Irish names keep the same vowel sound (Shea, Reagan), along with the rare exceptions ( great, break). Head and bread, swear and bear, kept the old ea sound. Then they all shifted, and merged- meat now sounds like meet mate has the same vowel sound as day, so as though-except where they didn’t.Ī few common words resisted the change. The Great Vowel Shift is a Linguistics 101 standby, so there is lots more information online, with audio clips.) Bite was pronounced BEE-tuh meet was pronounced MATE mate was pronounced MAH-tuh, with an a like in the modern word father mouse was pronounced MOOSE boot was pronounced BOAT boat was pronounced BOUGHT. No one knows why, though the Black Plague and Norman French overlords starting to speak English are two possible culprits.īefore the Shift, English words sounded like they would in easier European languages. Around 1400, all the long vowels in English started to change and several of them merged. If you’ve ever wondered why English spelling is so messed up, or why all the vowels in European languages like Spanish, Italian, and German are regular and different from ours, the answer-or a redescription of the question-is the Great Vowel Shift. The canal was also the biggest thing to hit English-language short vowels in a thousand years. Easy traffic made the Midwest “Northern” in the Civil War before the canal, the Midwest had been predominantly settled by Southerners. Every major city in New York except Binghamton and Elmira is located along its trade route from Rochester and Buffalo through Schenectady, Utica, and Syracuse to Albany and New York City. It turned Manhattan into a modern metropolis, made New York the Empire State, and created America the economic superpower. The canal linking the Great Lakes to the Hudson, opened in 1825, was about twenty times faster than portage: shipping costs dropped 90 percent. Grain, bulky and relatively cheap, was especially not worth hauling east. But everything in the Midwest-everything on the other side of the Appalachians-was stuck there, cut off from coastal and worldwide markets. In the early nineteenth century, New York companies were already sending ships down the coast so reliably that it was cheaper for Southern merchants to send their goods to Europe via New York than to ship them directly. One thing you can learn from Timescapes, the surprisingly moving twenty-two-minute video at the Museum of the City of New York, is how big a deal the Erie Canal was. Arthur Bowen Davies, Along the Erie Canal, 1890.
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