{"id":35439,"date":"2016-08-11T01:00:49","date_gmt":"2016-08-11T05:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=35439"},"modified":"2016-07-31T09:55:33","modified_gmt":"2016-07-31T13:55:33","slug":"qotd-the-great-vowel-shift-and-canadian-raising","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/08\/11\/qotd-the-great-vowel-shift-and-canadian-raising\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The Great Vowel Shift and “Canadian Raising”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Linguists do not generally attempt to answer questions of causality. \u201cWhy? I can’t answer that,\u201d said Dailey-O\u2019Cain when I asked. \u201cYou can look at ongoing changes sometimes if you have the right kind of data but it’s very, very hard.\u201d But there are theories. One particularly fascinating explanation has to do with what\u2019s called the Great Vowel Shift. If you\u2019ve ever wondered why English is such a legendarily horrible language to learn, a lot of the problems can be traced back to the Great Vowel Shift.<\/p>\n

There is no firm date on the beginning and end of the Great Vowel Shift, but at most, we can say it happened between the 1100s and the 1700s, with probably the most important and biggest changes happening in the 1400s and 1500s. This coincides with the shift from Middle English to Modern English, and also with the standardization of spelling. The shift itself? Every single \u201clong vowel\u201d \u2014 \u201dey,\u201d \u201cee,\u201d \u201caye,\u201d \u201coh,\u201d \u201cooh\u201d \u2014 changed. (Nobody knows why. Linguistics is turtles all the way down.)<\/p>\n

Before the Great Vowel Shift, \u201cbite\u201d was pronounced more like \u201cbeet.\u201d \u201cMeat\u201d was more like \u201cmate.\u201d Everything just kind of slipped one notch over. This happened in stages; that first word, \u201cbite,\u201d started out as \u201cbeet,\u201d then became \u201cbait,\u201d then \u201cbeyt,\u201d then \u201cbite.\u201d You can hear a nice spoken-aloud rundown of those here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re wondering what the difference between \u201cbait\u201d and \u201cbeyt\u201d is, well, there you have one possible origin of Canadian Raising. \u201cBeyt,\u201d one of the later but not the final stage of the Great Vowel Shift, is extremely similar to the Canadian Raised sound spoken today. There is a theory \u2014 not necessarily accepted by all \u2014 that Canadian Raised vowels are actually a preserved remnant of the Great Vowel Shift, an in-between vowel sound that was somehow stuck in amber in the Great White North.<\/p>\n

Maybe a certain population of Englishmen from that particular time period, around 1600, landed in Canada and due to its isolation failed to observe the further changes happening in England. Maybe. <\/p>\n

But I like this explanation. Canadians aren\u2019t weird; they\u2019re respecting the past. One very specific past, that everyone else skipped on by. It\u2019s an awfully nice-sounding diphthong.<\/p>\n

Dan Nosowitz, “What’s Going On with the Way Canadians Say ‘About’? It’s not pronounced how you think it is”, Atlas Obscura<\/em><\/a>, 2016-06-01.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Linguists do not generally attempt to answer questions of causality. \u201cWhy? I can’t answer that,\u201d said Dailey-O\u2019Cain when I asked. \u201cYou can look at ongoing changes sometimes if you have the right kind of data but it’s very, very hard.\u201d But there are theories. One particularly fascinating explanation has to do with what\u2019s called the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,62,7,41],"tags":[209,400],"class_list":["post-35439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-europe","category-history","category-quotations","tag-anthropology","tag-language"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9dB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35439"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35440,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35439\/revisions\/35440"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}