The Great Vowel Shift.

A major factor separating Middle English from Modern English is known as the Great Vowel Shift.

Early New English witnessed the greatest event in the history of Eng Vowels – The Great Vowel Shift, which involved the change of the all ME long monophthongs and som of the diphthongs.

The Great Vowel Shift – the name given to a series of changes of long vowels between the 14th and the 18th c. During this period all the long vowels became closer or were diphthongised.
The changes can be defined as "independent" as they were non caused by any apparent phonetic conditions in the syllable or the word but affected regulary every stressed long vowel in any position.

The causes of the shift are still highly debated, although an important factor may have been the very fact of the large intake of loanwords from the Romance languages of Europe during this time, which required a different kind of pronunciation. It was, however, a peculiarly English phenomenon, and contemporary and neighbouring languages like French, German and Spanish were entirely unaffected. It affected words of both native ancestry as well as borrowings from French and Latin.

 The GVSH didn’t add any new sounds to the vowel system, in fact every vowel which developed under the shift can be found in late ME. And, nevertheless, the GVSH was the most profound and comprehensive change in the history of Eng vowels: every long vowel, as well as some diphthongs, were "shifted" and the pronunciation of all the words with there sounds were altered.

It is important to note that the GVSH was not follow by any regular spelling changes: as seen from the examples the modification in their written forms. During the shift even some Eng letters were changed for they contained long vowels.

The chronological frame of the shift remains somewhat doubtful. The well-known Engish scholar Herry Sweet and Danish scholar O. Jesperson thought that the shift was only completed in the 18^th century and that the pronunciation of the 16-17^th centuries was smth intermediate between the ME and the modern pronunciation.

O. Jasperson represented this view in the following way:

So, while modern English speakers can read Chaucer’s Middle English (with some difficulty admittedly), Chaucer’s pronunciation would have been almost completely unintelligible to the modern ear. The English of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the late 16th and early 17th Century, on the other hand, would be accented, but quite understandable, and it has much more in common with our language today than it does with the language of Chaucer.

26. Growth of Long Monophthongs & Diphthongs in Early New English due to Vocalization of Consonants.

The history of English vowels would be incomplete if we did not mention the development of new long monophthongs and diphthongs, resulting from the vocalisation of some consonants, though these changes pertain to the history of consonants no less than to that of vowels. We may recall that vocalisation of some fricative consonants led to the appearance of long monophthongs and of new diphthongs — with i-and u-glides during the Early ME period. Similar processes continued in later ages.

Two voiceless fricatives, [x] and [x']_, were vocalised towards the end of the ME period. The glide [u] had probably developed before the velar consonant [x] even before its vocalisation; it is regularly shown in ME spellings, e.g. ME taughte, braughte ['tauxt∂, ['brauxt∂]. Later [au] was contracted to [ב:] in accordance with regular vowel changes, and [x] was lost, which transformed the words into NE taught, brought.

The palatal fricative [x'] changed to [j] some time during the 15th c; it changed into the vowel [i] and together with the preceding [i] yielded a long monophthong [i:], which participated in the Great Vowel Shift. Thus, words like night, since the age of Chaucer have passed through the following stages: [nix't]>[nijt]>[ni:t]>[nait].

The most important instance of vocalisation is the development of [r], which accounts for the appearance of many new long monophthongs and diphthongs.

The sonorant [r] began to produce a certain influence upon the preceding vowels in Late ME, long before it showed any signs of vocalisation, [r] made the preceding vowel more open and retracted: the cluster [er] changed to [ar], e.g. OE deorc became Early ME derk [derk] due to the contraction of the OE diphthong [eo] to [e], and changed to dark [dark] in Late ME (NE dark); likewise OE clerec, which after the loss of the unstressed vowel became ME clerk [klerk], changed to [klark] (NE clerk); OE heorte developed into ME herte ['hert∂], and Late ME [hart] (NE heart).

The vocalisation of [r] took place in the 16th or 17th c. In ME [r] was a rolled or trilled sound more like the Russian or Ukrainian [r] than its Mod E descendant. The modification of [r] in the early 17th c. was noticed and commented upon by the contemporaries: Ben Jonson remarked that [r] began to sound “firm in the beginning of words and more liquid in the middle and ends”. The new variants of pronunciation gradually displaced the older ones.

In Early NE [r] was vocalised when it stood after vowels, either finally or followed by another consonant. Losing its consonantal character [r] changed into the neutral sound [∂], which was added to the preceding vowel as a glide thus forming a diphthong; e.g. ME there ['θε:re]> NE there. Sometimes the only trace left by the loss of [r] was the compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel, e.g. ME arm [arm]>NE arm, ME for [for]>[fo∂]>[fo: ] (NE for). If [r] stood in the final unstressed syllable after [∂], the vocalisation of [rl to [9] resulted in the survival of the ending, e.g. ME rider(e) ['ri:d∂r∂];> ['ri:d∂r]>NE rider. If the neutral [a] produced by the vocalisation of [r] was preceded by a diphthong, it was added to the diphthong to form a sequence of sounds named "triphthong", e.g. ME shour [∫u:r], NE shower [‘∫au∂].

It is apparent that the vocalisation of [r] had a profound effect on the vowel system: there developed a new set of diphthongs, and also triphthongs, with ∂-glides:[i∂, ε∂, u∂, etc.]; there arose a new central long monophthong [∂:]; the new long [a:] filled a vacant position in the system, since ME [a:] had been diphthongised under the Great Vowel Shift, and the new [ב: ] merged with [ב: ] resulting from the contraction of ME [au] (e.g. drauen ['drau∂n]>NE draw).

27. Changes in the nominal system in Middle & New English.

The grammar system of the language in middle and new English periods underwent radical changes. As we remember, the principal means of expressing grammatical relations in Old English were the following:

• suffixation
• vowel interchange
• use of suppletive forms,

all these means being synthetic.

In middle and New English many grammatical notions formerly expressed synthetically either disappeared from the grammar system of the language or came to be expressed by analytical means. There developed the use of analytical forms consisting of a form word and notional word, and also word order, special use of prepositions, etc. – analytical means.

In Middle and New English we observe the process of the gradual loss of declension by many parts of speech, formerly declined. Thus in Middle English there declinable parts of speech: the noun, the pronoun and the adjective, against five existing in Old English (the above plus the infinitive and the participle). In New English the noun and the pronoun (mainly personal) are only parts of speech that are declined.

The noun in Middle English

Morphological classification

In Old English there were three principal types of declensions:

a-stem, n-stem and root-stem declension, and also minor declensions: i-stem, u-stem and others. These types are preserved in Middle English, but the number of nouns belonging to the same declension in Old and Middle English varies. The n-stem declension though preserved as a type has lost many of the nouns belonging to it while the original a-stem declension grows in volumes, acquiring new words from the original a-stem, root-stem declensions, and also different groups of minor declensions and also borrowed words. For example: