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89-543: The Great Vowel Shift was a series of pronunciation changes in the vowels of the English language that took place primarily between the 1400s and 1600s (the transition period from Middle English to Early Modern English ), beginning in southern England and today having influenced effectively all dialects of English. Through this massive vowel shift , the pronunciation of all Middle English long vowels altered. Some consonant sounds also changed, specifically becoming silent;

178-465: A diaphoneme , which represents this interdialectal correspondence. A commonly-used system of lexical sets, devised by John C. Wells , is presented below; for each set, the corresponding phonemes are given for RP and General American, using the notation that will be used on this page. For a table that shows the pronunciations of these vowels in a wider range of English accents, see Sound correspondences between English accents . The following tables show

267-417: A speech sound or of a group of different sounds that are all perceived to have the same function by speakers of that particular language or dialect. For example, the English word through consists of three phonemes: the initial "th" sound, the "r" sound, and a vowel sound. The phonemes in that and many other English words do not always correspond directly to the letters used to spell them (English orthography

356-468: A -like quality, perhaps about [ɐɹ] or [äɹ] . With the spelling ⟨or⟩ , the sound may have been backed, more toward [ɒɹ] in words like worth and word . In some pronunciations, words like fair and fear , with the spellings ⟨air⟩ and ⟨ear⟩ , rhymed with each other, and words with the spelling ⟨are⟩ , such as prepare and compare , were sometimes pronounced with

445-716: A VC syllable /æŋsts/ rather than as VC /æŋksts/ ). From the phonetic point of view, the analysis of syllable structures is a complex task: because of widespread occurrences of articulatory overlap, English speakers rarely produce an audible release of individual consonants in consonant clusters. This coarticulation can lead to articulatory gestures that seem very much like deletions or complete assimilations. For example, hundred pounds may sound like [hʌndɹɪ b paʊndz] and jumped back (in slow speech, [dʒʌmptbæk] ) may sound like [dʒʌmpbæk] , but X-ray and electropalatographic studies demonstrate that inaudible and possibly weakened contacts or lingual gestures may still be made. Thus

534-442: A cluster that does not occur initially in English. The division /ˈɛk.strə/ is therefore preferred. If assigning a consonant or consonants to the following syllable would result in the preceding syllable ending in an unreduced short vowel, this is avoided. Thus the word lemma should be divided /ˈlɛm.ə/ and not * /ˈlɛ.mə/ , even though the latter division gives the maximal onset to the following syllable. In some cases, no solution

623-605: A few notable differences in pronunciation: The following information primarily comes from studies of the Great Vowel Shift ; see the related chart. The difference between the transcription of the EME diphthong offsets with ⟨ j w ⟩, as opposed to the usual modern English transcription with ⟨ ɪ̯ ʊ̯ ⟩ is not meaningful in any way. The precise EME realizations are not known, and they vary even in modern English. The r sound (the phoneme / r / )

712-548: A fricative before /θ/ is elided so that these never appear phonetically: /fɪfθ/ becomes [fɪθ] , /sɪksθ/ becomes [sɪkθ] , /twɛlfθ/ becomes [twɛlθ] . The prosodic features of English – stress, rhythm, and intonation – can be described as follows. Prosodic stress is extra stress given to words or syllables when they appear in certain positions in an utterance, or when they receive special emphasis. According to Ladefoged's analysis (as referred to under § Lexical stress above), English normally has prosodic stress on

801-413: A mbition and the /aɪ/ in fin i te . Some phonologists regard such syllables as not being fully unstressed (they may describe them as having tertiary stress ); some dictionaries have marked such syllables as having secondary stress . However linguists such as Ladefoged and Bolinger (1986) regard this as a difference purely of vowel quality and not of stress, and thus argue that vowel reduction itself

890-515: A more conservative and increasingly rural Northern sound, while "younger" refers to a more mainstream Northern sound largely emerging just since the twentieth century. The vowel systems of Northern and Southern Middle English immediately before the Great Vowel Shift were different in one way. In Northern Middle English, the back close-mid vowel /oː/ in boot had already shifted to front /øː/ (a sound change known as fronting ), like

979-406: A more open vowel sound, like the verbs are and scar . See Great Vowel Shift § Later mergers for more information. Nature was pronounced approximately as [ˈnɛːtəɹ] and may have rhymed with letter or, early on, even latter . One may have been pronounced own , with both one and other using the era's long GOAT vowel, rather than today's STRUT vowels. Tongue derived from

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1068-661: A new past form ( dared ), distinct from the modal durst . The perfect of the verbs had not yet been standardised to use only the auxiliary verb "to have". Some took as their auxiliary verb "to be", such as this example from the King James Version : "But which of you... will say unto him... when he is come from the field, Go and sit down..." [Luke XVII:7]. The rules for the auxiliaries for different verbs were similar to those that are still observed in German and French (see unaccusative verb ). The modern syntax used for

1157-740: A slightly greater number of symbols than this, to take account of certain sounds used in foreign words and certain noticeable distinctions that may not be—strictly speaking—phonemic. The following table shows the 24 consonant phonemes found in most dialects of English, plus /x/ , whose distribution is more limited. Fortis consonants are always voiceless , aspirated in syllable onset (except in clusters beginning with /s/ or /ʃ/ ), and sometimes also glottalized to an extent in syllable coda (most likely to occur with /t/ , see T-glottalization ), while lenis consonants are always unaspirated and un-glottalized, and generally partially or fully voiced . The alveolars are usually apical , i.e. pronounced with

1246-521: A voiceless /r/ (and for some people an affricated tr as in tree ), vs night-rate /ˈnaɪt.reɪt/ → [ˈnaɪt̚ɹeɪt] with a voiced /r/ . Cues of syllable boundaries include aspiration of syllable onsets and (in the US) flapping of coda /t, d/ (a tease /ə.ˈtiːz/ → [əˈtʰiːz] vs. at ease /ət.ˈiːz/ → [əɾˈiːz] ), epenthetic stops like [t] in syllable codas ( fence /ˈfens/ → [ˈfents] but inside /ɪn.ˈsaɪd/ → [ɪnˈsaɪd] ), and r-colored vowels when

1335-543: A vowel or an h , as in mine eyes or thine hand . During the Early Modern period, the verb inflections became simplified as they evolved towards their modern forms: The modal auxiliaries cemented their distinctive syntactical characteristics during the Early Modern period. Thus, the use of modals without an infinitive became rare (as in "I must to Coventry"; "I'll none of that"). The use of modals' present participles to indicate aspect (as in "Maeyinge suffer no more

1424-534: A way that divides words in a counter-intuitive way; thus the word hardware would be divided /ˈhɑː.dweə/ by the maximal onset principle, but dictionaries prefer the division /ˈhɑːd.weə/ . In the approach used by the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary , Wells claims that consonants syllabify with the preceding rather than following vowel when the preceding vowel is the nucleus of a more salient syllable, with stressed syllables being

1513-587: A whole, lexical sets are often used, each named by a word containing the vowel or vowels in question. For example, the LOT set consists of words which, like lot , have /ɒ/ in Received Pronunciation and /ɑ/ in General American . The " LOT vowel" then refers to the vowel that appears in those words in whichever dialect is being considered, or (at a greater level of abstraction ) to

1602-406: Is ascribed one of three degrees of stress: primary , secondary or unstressed . Ordinarily, in each such word there will be exactly one syllable with primary stress, possibly one syllable having secondary stress, and the remainder are unstressed (unusually-long words may have multiple syllables with secondary stress). For example, the word a ma zing has primary stress on the second syllable, while

1691-543: Is called a push chain . However, according to professor Jürgen Handke , for some time, there was a phonetic split between words with the vowel /iː/ and the diphthong /əi/ , in words where the Middle English /iː/ shifted to the Modern English /aɪ/ . For an example, high was pronounced with the vowel /iː/ , and like and my were pronounced with the diphthong /əi/ . Therefore, for logical reasons,

1780-475: Is completely satisfactory: for example, in British English (RP) the word hurry could be divided /ˈhʌ.ri/ or /ˈhʌr.i/ , but the former would result in an analysis with a syllable-final /ʌ/ (which is held to be non-occurring) while the latter would result in a syllable final /r/ (which is said not to occur in this accent). Some phonologists have suggested a compromise analysis where the consonant in

1869-608: Is generally ascribed to syllables that are pronounced with less force than those with secondary stress, but nonetheless contain a "full" or "unreduced" vowel (vowels that are considered to be reduced are listed under English phonology § Unstressed syllables above). Hence the third syllable of organization , if pronounced with /aɪ/ as shown above (rather than being reduced to /ɪ/ or /ə/ ), might be said to have tertiary stress. (The precise identification of secondary and tertiary stress differs between analyses; dictionaries do not generally show tertiary stress, although some have taken

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1958-659: Is not as strongly phonemic as that of many other languages). The number and distribution of phonemes in English vary from dialect to dialect, and also depend on the interpretation of the individual researcher. The number of consonant phonemes is generally put at 24 (or slightly more depending on the dialect). The number of vowels is subject to greater variation; in the system presented on this page there are 20–25 vowel phonemes in Received Pronunciation , 14–16 in General American and 19–21 in Australian English . The pronunciation keys used in dictionaries generally contain

2047-522: Is phonemic in English. Examples of words where vowel reduction seems to be distinctive for some speakers include chickar ee vs. chicor y (the latter has the reduced vowel of HAPP Y , whereas the former has the FLEECE vowel without reduction), and Phar aoh vs. farr ow (both have the GOAT vowel, but in the latter word it may reduce to [ɵ] ). Lexical stress is phonemic in English. For example,

2136-503: Is pronounced with the vowel /eɪ/ as in mate rather than the vowel /iː/ as in meat . This is a simplified picture of the changes that happened between late Middle English (late ME), Early Modern English (EModE), and today's English (ModE). Pronunciations in 1400, 1500, 1600, and 1900 are shown. To hear recordings of the sounds, click the phonetic symbols. Before labial consonants and also after / j / , /uː/ did not shift, and /uː/ remains as in s ou p . The first phase of

2225-400: Is the study of the sequences of phonemes that occur in languages and the sound structures that they form. In this study it is usual to represent consonants in general with the letter C and vowels with the letter V, so that a syllable such as 'be' is described as having CV structure. The IPA symbol used to show a division between syllables is the full stop ⟨ . ⟩. Syllabification is

2314-404: Is unstressed, it is reduced to schwa. Also, certain common words ( a , an , of , for , etc.) are pronounced with a schwa when they are unstressed, although they have different vowels when they are in a stressed position (see Weak and strong forms in English ). Some unstressed syllables, however, retain full (unreduced) vowels, i.e. vowels other than those listed above. Examples are the /æ/ in

2403-449: The pane-pain merger ) monophthongised to /ɛː/ , and merged with Middle English /aː/ as in mate or /ɛː/ as in meat . During the 16th and 17th centuries, several different pronunciation variants existed among different parts of the population for words like meet , meat , mate , and day . Different pairs or trios of words were merged in pronunciation in each pronunciation variant. Four different pronunciation variants are shown in

2492-424: The /l/ is a little longer and the /ɪ/ is not reduced. Similarly, in toe-strap Wells argues that the second /t/ is a full plosive, as usual in syllable onset, whereas in toast-rack the second /t/ is in many dialects reduced to the unreleased allophone it takes in syllable codas, or even elided: /ˈtoʊ.stræp/, /ˈtoʊst.ræk/ → [ˈtoˑʊstɹæp, ˈtoʊs(t̚)ɹæk] ; likewise nitrate /ˈnaɪtr.eɪt/ → [ˈnaɪtɹ̥eɪt] with

2581-1628: The /r/ is in the coda vs. labialization when it is in the onset (key-ring /ˈkiː.rɪŋ/ → [ˈkiːɹʷɪŋ] but fearing /ˈfiːr.ɪŋ/ → [ˈfɪəɹɪŋ] ). The following can occur as the onset : /pl/ , /bl/ , /kl/ , /ɡl/ , /pr/ , /br/ , /tr/ , /dr/ , /kr/ , /ɡr/ , /tw/ , /dw/ , /ɡw/ , /kw/ , /pw/ /fl/ , /sl/ , /θl/ , /ʃl/ , /fr/ , /θr/ , /ʃr/ , /hw/ , /sw/ , /θw/ , /vw/ /pj/ , /bj/ , /tj/ , /dj/ , /kj/ , /ɡj/ , /mj/ , /nj/ , /fj/ , /vj/ , /θj/ , /sj/ , /zj/ , /hj/ , /lj/ /sp/ , /st/ , /sk/ /sm/ , /sn/ /sf/ , /sθ/ /spl/ , /skl/ , /spr/ , /str/ , /skr/ , /skw/ , /spj/ , /stj/ , /skj/ /smj/ /snj/ /sfr/ Notes: Certain English onsets appear only in contractions: e.g. /zbl/ ( 'sblood ), and /zw/ or /dzw/ ( 'swounds or 'dswounds ). Some, such as /pʃ/ ( pshaw ), /fw/ ( fwoosh ), or /vr/ ( vroom ), can occur in interjections . An archaic voiceless fricative plus nasal exists, /fn/ ( fnese ), as does an archaic /snj/ ( snew ). Several additional onsets occur in loan words (with varying degrees of anglicization) such as /bw/ ( bwana ), /mw/ ( moiré ), /nw/ ( noire ), /tsw/ ( zwitterion ), /zw/ ( zwieback ), /dv/ ( Dvorak ), /kv/ ( kvetch ), /ʃv/ ( schvartze ), /tv/ ( Tver ), /tsv/ ( Zwickau ), /kʃ/ ( Kshatriya ), /sɡl/ ( sglods ), /tl/ ( Tlaloc ), /vl/ ( Vladimir ), /zl/ ( zloty ), /tsk/ ( Tskhinvali ), /hm/ ( Hmong ), /km/ ( Khmer ), and /ŋ/ ( Nganasan ). Some clusters of this type can be converted to regular English phonotactics by simplifying

2670-636: The Hebrew and Ancient Greek distinction between second person singular ("thou") and plural ("ye"). It was not to denote reverence (in the King James Version , God addresses individual people and even Satan as "thou") but only to denote the singular. Over the centuries, however, the very fact that "thou" was dropping out of normal use gave it a special aura and so it gradually and ironically came to be used to express reverence in hymns and in prayers. Like other personal pronouns, thou and ye have different forms dependent on their grammatical case ; specifically,

2759-460: The Interregnum were times of social and political upheaval and instability. The dates for Restoration literature are a matter of convention and differ markedly from genre to genre. In drama, the "Restoration" may last until 1700, but in poetry, it may last only until 1666, the annus mirabilis (year of wonders), and in prose lasts until 1688. With the increasing tensions over succession and

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2848-464: The United States , and General Australian for Australia . Nevertheless, many other dialects of English are spoken, which have developed differently from these standardized accents, particularly regional dialects. Descriptions of standardized reference accents provide only a limited guide to the phonology of other dialects of English. A phoneme of a language or dialect is an abstraction of

2937-520: The progressive aspect ("I am walking") became dominant by the end of the Early Modern period, but other forms were also common such as the prefix a- ("I am a-walking") and the infinitive paired with "do" ("I do walk"). Moreover, the to be + - ing verb form could be used to express a passive meaning without any additional markers: "The house is building" could mean "The house is being built". A number of words that are still in common use in Modern English have undergone semantic narrowing . The use of

3026-408: The syllable coda : /e/ , /i/ and /u/ (roughly equivalent to modern /ɛ/ , /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ ; /ʌ/ had not yet developed). In London English they gradually merged into a phoneme that became modern / ɜːr / . By the time of Shakespeare, the spellings ⟨er⟩ , ⟨ear⟩ and perhaps ⟨or⟩ when they had a short vowel, as in clerk , earth , or divert , had an

3115-502: The 1530s) but by 1650, "thou" seems old-fashioned or literary. It has effectively completely disappeared from Modern Standard English . The translators of the King James Version of the Bible (begun 1604 and published 1611, while Shakespeare was at the height of his popularity) had a particular reason for keeping the informal "thou/thee/thy/thine/thyself" forms that were slowly beginning to fall out of spoken use, as it enabled them to match

3204-531: The Great Shift slightly earlier. Still, the spelling was changed accordingly (e.g., Middle High German bīzen → modern German beißen "to bite"). This timeline uses representative words to show the main vowel changes between late Middle English in the year 1400 and Received Pronunciation in the mid-20th century. The Great Vowel Shift occurred in the lower half of the table, between 1400 and 1600–1700. The changes after 1700 are not considered part of

3293-427: The Great Vowel Shift affected the Middle English close-mid vowels /eː oː/ , as in beet and boot , and the close vowels /iː uː/ , as in bite and out . The close-mid vowels /eː oː/ became close /iː uː/ , and the close vowels /iː uː/ became diphthongs. The first phase was completed in 1500, meaning that by that time, words like beet and boot had lost their Middle English pronunciation and were pronounced with

3382-551: The Great Vowel Shift in Northern and Southern English is shown in the table below. The Northern English developments of Middle English /iː, eː/ and /oː, uː/ were different from Southern English. In particular, the Northern English vowels /iː/ in bite , /eː/ in feet , and /oː/ in boot shifted, while the vowel /uː/ in house did not. These developments below fall under the label "older" to refer to Scots and

3471-716: The Great Vowel Shift. Pronunciation is given in the International Phonetic Alphabet : [REDACTED] Before the Great Vowel Shift, Middle English in Southern England had seven long vowels, /iː eː ɛː aː ɔː oː uː/ . The vowels occurred in, for example, the words mite , meet , meat , mate , boat , boot , and bout , respectively. The words had very different pronunciations in Middle English from those in Modern English: In addition, Middle English had: After around 1300,

3560-472: The approach of marking all syllables with unreduced vowels as having at least secondary stress.) In some analyses, then, the concept of lexical stress may become conflated with that of vowel reduction. An approach that attempts to separate both is provided by Peter Ladefoged , who states that it is possible to describe English with only one degree of stress, as long as unstressed syllables are phonemically distinguished for vowel reduction . In this approach,

3649-642: The beginning of the Georgian era in 1714, but English orthography remained somewhat fluid until the publication of Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language , in 1755. The towering importance of William Shakespeare over the other Elizabethan authors was the result of his reception during the 17th and the 18th centuries, which directly contributes to the development of Standard English . Shakespeare's plays are therefore still familiar and comprehensible 400 years after they were written, but

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3738-426: The close vowels /iː uː/ could have diphthongised before the close-mid vowels /eː oː/ raised. Otherwise, high would probably rhyme with thee rather than my . This type of chain is called a drag chain . The second phase of the Great Vowel Shift affected the Middle English open vowel /aː/ , as in mate , and the Middle English open-mid vowels /ɛː ɔː/ , as in meat and boat . Around 1550, Middle English /aː/

3827-411: The close-mid vowels /eː oː/ were the first to shift. As the Middle English vowels /eː oː/ were raised towards /iː uː/ , they forced the original Middle English /iː uː/ out of place and caused them to become diphthongs /ei ou/ . This type of sound change, in which one vowel's pronunciation shifts so that it is pronounced like a second vowel, and the second vowel is forced to change its pronunciation,

3916-419: The cluster: e.g. /(d)z/ ( dziggetai ), /(h)r/ ( Hrolf ), /kr(w)/ ( croissant ), /(ŋ)w/ ( Nguyen ), /(p)f/ ( pfennig ), /(f)θ/ ( phthalic ), /(t)s/ ( tsunami ), /(ǃ)k/ ( !kung ), and /k(ǁ)/ ( Xhosa ). Others can be replaced by native clusters differing only in voice : /zb ~ sp/ ( sbirro ), and /zɡr ~ skr/ ( sgraffito ). The following can occur as the nucleus : Most (in theory, all) of

4005-412: The consonant cluster CC is a possible syllable coda; in addition, /r/ preferentially syllabifies with the preceding vowel even when both syllables are unstressed, so that CVrV occurs as /CVr.V/ . This is the analysis used in the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary . However, this view is not widely accepted, as explained in the following section. English allows clusters of up to three consonants in

4094-435: The corresponding rise in journalism and periodicals, or until possibly 1700, when those periodicals grew more stabilised. The 17th-century port towns and their forms of speech gained influence over the old county towns . From around the 1690s onwards, England experienced a new period of internal peace and relative stability, which encouraged the arts including literature. Modern English can be taken to have emerged fully by

4183-566: The difference between the Northern and Southern vowel shifts, /uː/ did not shift because there was no back mid vowel /oː/ in Northern English. In Southern English, shifting of /oː/ to /uː/ could have caused diphthongisation of original /uː/ , but because Northern English had no back close-mid vowel /oː/ to shift, the back close vowel /uː/ did not diphthongise. English phonology Phonological analysis of English often concentrates on prestige or standard accents, such as Received Pronunciation for England , General American for

4272-521: The diphthongs /ei ou/ shifted to /ɛi ɔu/ , then /əi əu/ , and finally to Modern English /aɪ aʊ/ . This sequence of events is supported by the testimony of orthoepists before Hodges in 1644. However, many scholars such as Dobson (1968) , Kökeritz (1953) , and Cercignani (1981) argue for theoretical reasons that, contrary to what 16th-century witnesses report, the vowels /iː uː/ were immediately centralised and lowered to /əi əu/ . Evidence from Northern English and Scots ( see below ) suggests that

4361-484: The distinction between primary and secondary stress is regarded as a phonetic or prosodic detail rather than a phonemic feature – primary stress is seen as an example of the predictable "tonic" stress that falls on the final stressed syllable of a prosodic unit . For more details of this analysis, see Stress and vowel reduction in English . For stress as a prosodic feature (emphasis of particular words within utterances), see § Prosodic stress below. Phonotactics

4450-411: The final stressed syllable in an intonation unit . This is said to be the origin of the distinction traditionally made at the lexical level between primary and secondary stress: when a word like admiration (traditionally transcribed as something like /ˌædmɪˈreɪʃən/ ) is spoken in isolation, or at the end of a sentence, the syllable ra (the final stressed syllable) is pronounced with greater force than

4539-663: The first and third syllables are unstressed, whereas the word or gani za tion has primary stress on the fourth syllable, secondary stress on the first, and the second, third, and fifth unstressed. This is often shown in pronunciation keys using the IPA symbols for primary and secondary stress (which are ˈ and ˌ respectively), placed before the syllables to which they apply. The two words just given may therefore be represented (in RP ) as /əˈmeɪzɪŋ/ and /ˌɔːɡənaɪˈzeɪʃən/ . Some analysts identify an additional level of stress ( tertiary stress). This

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4628-528: The following except those that end with /s/ , /z/ , /ʃ/ , /ʒ/ , /tʃ/ or /dʒ/ can be extended with /s/ or /z/ representing the morpheme -s/-z. Similarly, most (in theory, all) of the following except those that end with /t/ or /d/ can be extended with /t/ or /d/ representing the morpheme -t/-d. Wells (1990) argues that a variety of syllable codas are possible in English, even /ntr, ndr/ in words like entry /ˈɛntr.i/ and sundry /ˈsʌndr.i/ , with /tr, dr/ being treated as affricates along

4717-413: The following syllable. Thus the word leaving should be divided /ˈliː.vɪŋ/ rather than * /ˈliːv.ɪŋ/ , and hasty is /ˈheɪ.sti/ rather than * /ˈheɪs.ti/ or * /ˈheɪst.i/ . However, when such a division results in an onset cluster that is not allowed in English, the division must respect this. Thus if the word extra were divided * /ˈɛ.kstrə/ the resulting onset of the second syllable would be /kstr/ ,

4806-578: The last stressed syllable of the emphasized word, din ner. Early Modern English Early Modern English (sometimes abbreviated EModE or EMnE ) or Early New English ( ENE ) is the stage of the English language from the beginning of the Tudor period to the English Interregnum and Restoration , or from the transition from Middle English , in the late 15th century, to

4895-539: The late phase of Early Modern English, such as the King James Bible and the works of William Shakespeare , and they have greatly influenced Modern English. Texts from the earlier phase of Early Modern English, such as the late-15th-century Le Morte d'Arthur (1485) and the mid-16th-century Gorboduc (1561), may present more difficulties but are still closer to Modern English grammar, lexicon and phonology than are 14th-century Middle English texts, such as

4984-401: The lenis stops and affricate /b, d, dʒ, ɡ/ by several phonetic features. English, much like other Germanic languages, has a particularly large number of vowel phonemes, and in addition the vowels of English differ considerably between dialects. Consequently, corresponding vowels may be transcribed with various symbols depending on the dialect under consideration. When considering English as

5073-411: The lines of /tʃ, dʒ/ . He argues that the traditional assumption that pre-vocalic consonants form a syllable with the following vowel is due to the influence of languages like French and Latin, where syllable structure is CVC.CVC regardless of stress placement. Disregarding such contentious cases, which do not occur at the ends of words, the following sequences can occur as the coda : For some speakers,

5162-578: The long ö in German hören [ˈhøːʁən] "hear". Thus, Southern English had a back close-mid vowel /oː/ , but Northern English did not: In Northern and Southern English, the first step of the Great Vowel Shift raised the close-mid vowels to become close. Northern Middle English had two close-mid vowels – /eː/ in feet and /øː/ in boot – which were raised to /iː/ and /yː/ . Later on, Northern English /yː/ changed to /iː/ in many dialects (though not in all, see Phonological history of Scots § Vowel 7 ), so that boot has

5251-576: The long vowels of Middle English began changing in pronunciation as follows: These changes occurred over several centuries and can be divided into two phases. The first phase affected the close vowels /iː uː/ and the close-mid vowels /eː oː/ : /eː oː/ were raised to /iː uː/ , and /iː uː/ became the diphthongs /ei ou/ or /əi əu/ . The second phase affected the open vowel /aː/ and the open-mid vowels /ɛː ɔː/ : /aː ɛː ɔː/ were raised, in most cases changing to /eː iː oː/ . The Great Vowel Shift changed vowels without merger , so Middle English before

5340-407: The loue & deathe of Aurelio" from 1556), and of their preterite forms to indicate tense (as in "he follow'd Horace so very close, that of necessity he must fall with him") also became uncommon. Some verbs ceased to function as modals during the Early Modern period. The present form of must , mot , became obsolete. Dare also lost the syntactical characteristics of a modal auxiliary and evolved

5429-415: The middle belongs to both syllables, and is described as ambisyllabic . In this way, it is possible to suggest an analysis of hurry that comprises the syllables /hʌr/ and /ri/ , the medial /r/ being ambisyllabic. Where the division coincides with a word boundary, or the boundary between elements of a compound word, it is not usual in the case of dictionaries to insist on the maximal onset principle in

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5518-455: The most salient, reduced syllables the least, and full unstressed vowels ("secondary stress") intermediate. But there are lexical differences as well, frequently but not exclusively with compound words. For example, in dolphin and selfish, Wells argues that the stressed syllable ends in /lf/ , but in shellfish, the /f/ belongs with the following syllable: /ˈdɒlf.ɪn, ˈself.ɪʃ/ → [ˈdɒlfɪ̈n, ˈselfɪ̈ʃ] , but /ˈʃel.fɪʃ/ → [ˈʃelˑfɪʃ] , where

5607-438: The noun in crease and the verb in crease are distinguished by the positioning of the stress on the first syllable in the former, and on the second syllable in the latter. (See initial-stress-derived noun .) Stressed syllables in English are louder than non-stressed syllables, as well as being longer and having a higher pitch. In traditional approaches, in any English word consisting of more than one syllable , each syllable

5696-448: The nuclei of unstressed syllables. These include: Vowel reduction in unstressed syllables is a significant feature of English. Syllables of the types listed above often correspond to a syllable containing a different vowel ("full vowel") used in other forms of the same morpheme where that syllable is stressed. For example, the first o in photograph , being stressed, is pronounced with the GOAT vowel, but in photography , where it

5785-469: The objective form of thou is thee , its possessive forms are thy and thine , and its reflexive or emphatic form is thyself . The objective form of ye was you , its possessive forms are your and yours and its reflexive or emphatic forms are yourself and yourselves . The older forms "mine" and "thine" had become "my" and "thy" before words beginning with a consonant other than h , and "mine" and "thine" were retained before words beginning with

5874-750: The points listed below the following tables). The symbols given in the table are traditional but redirect to their modern implementation. The differences between these tables can be explained as follows: Other points to be noted are these: Listed here are some of the significant cases of allophony of vowels found within standard English dialects. Unstressed syllables in English may contain almost any vowel, but in practice vowels in stressed and unstressed syllables tend to use different inventories of phonemes. In particular, long vowels are used less often in unstressed syllables than stressed syllables. Additionally there are certain sounds—characterized by central position and weakness—that are particularly often found as

5963-561: The process of dividing continuous speech into discrete syllables, a process in which the position of a syllable division is not always easy to decide upon. Most languages of the world syllabify CVCV and CVCCV sequences as /CV.CV/ and /CVC.CV/ or /CV.CCV/ , with consonants preferentially acting as the onset of a syllable containing the following vowel. According to one view, English is unusual in this regard, in that stressed syllables attract following consonants, so that ˈCVCV and ˈCVCCV syllabify as /ˈCVC.V/ and /ˈCVCC.V/ , as long as

6052-413: The same vowel as feet . Southern Middle English had two close-mid vowels – /eː/ in feet and /oː/ in boot – which were raised to /iː/ and /uː/ . In Southern English, the close vowels /iː/ in bite and /uː/ in house shifted to become diphthongs, but in Northern English, /iː/ in bite shifted but /uː/ in house did not. If the vowel systems at the time of the Great Vowel Shift caused

6141-474: The same vowels as in Modern English. The words bite and out were pronounced with diphthongs, but not the same diphthongs as in Modern English. Scholars agree that the Middle English close vowels /iː uː/ became diphthongs around 1500, but disagree about what diphthongs they changed to. According to Lass, the words bite and out after diphthongisation were pronounced as /beit/ and /out/ , similar to American English bait /beɪt/ and oat /oʊt/ . Later,

6230-495: The second /d/ in hundred pounds does not entirely assimilate to a labial place of articulation, rather the labial gesture co-occurs with the alveolar one; the "missing" [t] in jumped back may still be articulated, though not heard. Division into syllables is a difficult area, and different theories have been proposed. A widely accepted approach is the maximal onset principle: this states that, subject to certain constraints, any consonants in between vowels should be assigned to

6319-680: The shift did not operate on the long back vowels because they had undergone an earlier shift. Similarly, the dialect in Scotland had a different vowel system before the Great Vowel Shift, as /oː/ had shifted to /øː/ in Early Scots . In the Scots equivalent of the Great Vowel Shift, the long vowels /iː/ , /eː/ and /aː/ shifted to /ei/ , /iː/ and /eː/ by the Middle Scots period and /uː/ remained unaffected. The first step in

6408-406: The sound of tong and rhymed with song . Early Modern English had two second-person personal pronouns: thou , the informal singular pronoun, and ye , the plural (both formal and informal) pronoun and the formal singular pronoun. "Thou" and "ye" were both common in the early 16th century (they can be seen, for example, in the disputes over Tyndale 's translation of the Bible in the 1520s and

6497-429: The syllable ad , although when the word is not pronounced with this final intonation there may be no difference between the levels of stress of these two syllables. Prosodic stress can shift for various pragmatic functions, such as focus or contrast. For instance, in the dialogue Is it brunch tomorrow? No, it's dinner tomorrow , the extra stress shifts from the last stressed syllable of the sentence, to mor row , to

6586-467: The syllable onset and up to four consonants in the syllable coda, giving a general syllable structure of (C) V(C) , a potential example being strengths /strɛŋkθs/ (although this word has variant pronunciations with only 3 coda consonants, such as /strɛŋθs/ ). A five-consonant coda may occur in the word angsts , but this is a highly exceptional case, as the word is both infrequent and not always pronounced with five final segments (it can be analyzed as

6675-407: The table below. The fourth pronunciation variant gave rise to Modern English pronunciation. In Modern English, meet and meat are merged in pronunciation and both have the vowel /iː/ , and mate and day are merged with the diphthong /eɪ/ , which developed from the 16th-century long vowel /eː/ . Modern English typically has the meet – meat merger : both meet and meat are pronounced with

6764-423: The term Great Vowel Shift is occasionally used to include these consonantal changes. The standardization of English spelling began in the 15th and 16th centuries; the Great Vowel Shift is the major reason English spellings now often deviate considerably from how they represent pronunciations . The Great Vowel Shift was first studied by Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), a Danish linguist and Anglicist , who coined

6853-400: The term. The causes of the Great Vowel Shift are unknown and have been a source of intense scholarly debate; as yet, there is no firm consensus. The greatest changes occurred during the 15th and 16th centuries, and their origins are at least partly phonetic. The main difference between the pronunciation of Middle English in the year 1400 and Modern English ( Received Pronunciation ) is in

6942-423: The tip of the tongue touching or approaching the roof of the mouth, though some speakers produce them laminally , i.e. with the blade of the tongue. The following table shows typical examples of the occurrence of the above consonant phonemes in words, using minimal pairs where possible. In most dialects, the fortis stops and affricate /p, t, tʃ, k/ have various different allophones, and are distinguished from

7031-481: The transition to Modern English , in the mid-to-late 17th century. Before and after the accession of James I to the English throne in 1603, the emerging English standard began to influence the spoken and written Middle Scots of Scotland. The grammatical and orthographical conventions of literary English in the late 16th century and the 17th century are still very influential on modern Standard English . Most modern readers of English can understand texts written in

7120-487: The value of the long vowels . Long vowels in Middle English had " continental " values, much like those in Italian and Standard German ; in standard Modern English, they have entirely different pronunciations. The differing pronunciations of English vowel letters do not stem from the Great Shift as such but rather because English spelling did not adapt to the changes. German had undergone vowel changes quite similar to

7209-424: The verb "to suffer" in the sense of "to allow" survived into Early Modern English, as in the phrase "suffer the little children" of the King James Version , but it has mostly been lost in Modern English. This use still exists in the idiom "to suffer fools gladly". Also, this period includes one of the earliest Russian borrowings to English (which is historically a rare occasion itself ); at least as early as 1600,

7298-404: The vowel /iː/ . Words like great and steak , however, have merged with mate and are pronounced with the vowel /eɪ/ , which developed from the /eː/ shown in the table above. Before historic /r/ some of these vowels merged with /ə/ , /ɛ/ , /ɪ/ , /ʊ/ The Great Vowel Shift affected other dialects and the standard English of southern England but in different ways. In Northern England ,

7387-432: The vowel phonemes of three standard varieties of English. The notation system used here for Received Pronunciation (RP) is fairly standard; the others less so. The feature descriptions given here (front, close, etc.) are abstracted somewhat; the actual pronunciations of these vowels are somewhat more accurately conveyed by the IPA symbols used (see Vowel for a chart indicating the meanings of these symbols; though note also

7476-509: The vowel shift had the same number of vowel phonemes as Early Modern English after the vowel shift. After the Great Vowel Shift, some vowel phonemes began merging. Immediately after the Great Vowel Shift, the vowels of meet and meat were different, but they are merged in Modern English, and both words are pronounced as /miːt/ . However, during the 16th and the 17th centuries, there were many different mergers, and some mergers can be seen in individual Modern English words like great , which

7565-429: The works of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland , which had been written only 200 years earlier, are considerably more difficult for the average modern reader. The orthography of Early Modern English is recognisably similar to that of today , but spelling was unstable. Early Modern and Modern English both retain various orthographical conventions that predate the Great Vowel Shift . Early Modern English spelling

7654-418: The works of Geoffrey Chaucer . The change from Middle English to Early Modern English affected much more than just vocabulary and pronunciation. Middle English underwent significant change over time and contained large dialectical variations. Early Modern English, on the other hand, became more standardised and developed an established canon of literature which survives today. The English Civil War and

7743-661: Was broadly similar to that encountered in Middle English . Some of the changes that occurred were based on etymology (as with the silent ⟨b⟩ that was added to words like debt , doubt and subtle ). Many spellings had still not been standardised. For example, he was spelled as both he and hee in the same sentence in Shakespeare's plays and elsewhere. Certain key orthographic features of Early Modern English spelling have not been retained: Most consonant sounds of Early Modern English have survived into present-day English; however, there are still

7832-560: Was probably always pronounced with following vowel sounds (more in the style of today's General American , West Country English , Irish accents and Scottish accents, although in the case of the Scottish accent the R is rolled, and less like the pronunciation now usual in most of England.) Furthermore, at the beginning of the Early Modern English period there were three non-open and non- schwa short vowels before /r/ in

7921-450: Was raised to /æː/ . Then, after 1600, the new /æː/ was raised to /ɛː/ , with the Middle English open-mid vowels /ɛː ɔː/ raised to close-mid /eː oː/ . During the first and the second phases of the Great Vowel Shift, long vowels were shifted without merging with other vowels, but after the second phase, several vowels merged. The later changes also involved the Middle English diphthong /ɛj/ , as in day , which often (but not always, see

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