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by Steve Bett with some help from David Kelley and others Englsih spelling and pronunciation from 1000 to 1760 This is an electronic pre-print: Suggestions and corrections welcomed What
needs to be explained is why the shift did not affect all words.
Instead, the vowels in some words were shifted (or distorted) and the vowels
in other words with the same vowel spelling remained unchanged.
What needs to be explained is why words that are spelled the same do not
always rhyme.
The main difference between Chaucer's language and our own is in the pronunciation of the "long" vowels. The consonants remain generally the same, though Chaucer [1345-1400] rolled his r's, sometimes dropped his aitches, and pronounced both elements of consonant [and vowel] combinations, such as kn, in knife /kni:f@/. In Modern English the k is silent. The short vowels are very similar in Middle and Modern English. But the "long" vowels are strikingly different. This is due to what is called "The Great Vowel Shift": Beginning 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). (see vowel table-->)
Saxon-Spanglish (SS) is won of several world english (winglish) proposals to restor alfabetic spelling. SS restors the original Saxon ogmented Latin alfabet to unshift the vowels found in many English werd pronunciations. This set of grafim-fonim (letter-sound) corespondences is yusd to pronounce or sound out each letter in a werd. The result is a new dialect of English that is neither GA [general american] nor RP [british]. SS does not prescribe local pronunciation any more than TES does altho students ar expected to be abl to read aloud in both their local and the SP dialect, The SS spelling pronunciation dialect is a littl stranj bwt it can be [bay] understood by ol English speakers /spaykurz/. Ritn in Saxon Old and Middle English were written in the Latin alphabet [see the Saxon augmented Latin alphabet chart] and the vowels were represented by the letters assigned to the sounds in Latin. For example, English "long e" in "met" had the value of Latin "e" (and sounded like Modern English "mate" [/e/] in the International Phonetic Alphabet, IPA]). It had much the same value as written long e has in most modern European languages. (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. The Great Vowels Shift changed all that; by the end of the sixteenth century "met" sounded like Modern English "meet" [IPA /i/]. To many it seemed that the pronunciation of English had moved so far from its visual representation that a new alphabet was needed. In the early sixteenth century we had the first attempts to "reform" English spellings, a movement still active today. Thomas Hart went so far as to devise a new phonetic alphabet to remedy what he considered a fatal flaw in our system of language. (His alphabet and the work of other language reformers provides us with our best evidence for pronunciation of English in his time). 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" [/dip/] with our tongue forward and high in the mouth and the sound in Modern Enlish "boat" [/bot/] with our tongue lowered and drawn toward the back of the mouth. 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. There is a phonetic distinction between "close" and "open" e in Middle English. In general, words that in Modern English are spelled with ea such as meat , were open in Middle English. Those spelled with e or ee in Modern English such as meet , were closed in Middle English. The word great is an unusual preservation of the open vowel in Modern English. meat=mate, meet=meht Between [1300-1400], ure hus was transcribed by Norman French scribes as oure house with no change in pronunciation. cwen becomes queen. niht becomes night. sercl becomes cercle. The scribes replaced many o's with u's to improve legibility [love, come, one, son]. The spelling in 1400 was a mix of the two systems [Saxon & French] The consequences plague English learners still [Crystal, 41, 274]. This chart roughly represents
the places where the "long vowels" are articulated:
[The "o" representing the low back vowel above is there because I cannot find a way to print a backward c, the usual means of representing this sound.] The Great Vowel shift invloved
a regular movement of the places of articulation: The front vowels each
moved up a notch, except for /i:/, which formed a dipthong. Likewise the
back vowels moved up, except for /u:/, which formed another dipthong:
Note that the change affects only long, stressed vowels. The "y" in Middle Enghlish "my" was affected because it has primary stress, and we say /mai/; the "y" in a word like "only" was not affected (the primary stress is on thge first syllable and -ly lacks stress, so we say /li:/, making the -ly of "only" rime with the modern "see." [see used to be pronounced say]. The change is not as neat as is shown; /æ:/ ("open e," as it is called in most discussions) did not complete the movement from /æ:/ to /e:/ to /i:/ (contrast Mod. Eng. "break" and "beak"). Moreover, knowing when Middle English "e" represents /æ:/ and when "ou" (spelled o) is the open vowel depends on knowing the eymology of the words. Modern spellings offer a clue: as a general rule, where modern English uses "ea" (as in "read") or "oa" (as in loaf), the Middle English equivalent was the open sound. There are other, more exact
but more complex, ways of representing the change. Nevertheless the following
chart will provide a guide to the pronunciation of Chaucer's "long vowels":
http://fas-nt4.fas.harvard.edu/Users/chaucer/pronun_3.0/ Chaucer course: http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~eng10a/handouts/Pronunciation/ When a moved to o, then all the ah sounds sounds moved except those starting with the semivowel w From the Harvard page on
Chaucer:
long a is pronounced [ah] /ar/ as in modern "father"2. Final -e is almost always pronounced in positions where it is not elided by h- or vowel at the beginning of the following word. So the final -e of "sweete" is sounded in "sweete breeth", but not the final -e of "droghte" in "droghte_of". This rule is vitally important for getting Chaucer's metre right. 3. Consonants are all almost always pronounced. None are silent, as they often are in modern English (though retained in modern spelling). So the gh of "droghte" is fully pronounced, rather like the ch of Scottish "loch" or the ch of German "nacht". Likewise, the kn of "knyght" (line 42) is pronounced. The consonent r, as in "roote", is modestly rolled. I have sound files for a number of Middle English words which will be included on the final web page. I would like to find an etymological dictionary that was clear about early spellings and pronunciations. The ones that I have are always ambiguous.
http://victorian.fortunecity.com/vangogh/555/Spell/latin-1.html http://victorian.fortunecity.com/vangogh/555/Spell/sitemap-l.html Old
English Dictionary http://www.mun.ca/Ansaxdat/vocab/wordlist.html
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English in a
bottle - a quick solution.
Black English http://www.bsos.umd.edu/socy/socy241/Brown.htm
Examples of Sound Rule in West African Languages
No consonant pairs - jus ( just) tes (test)
Few long vowels or two-part vowels - rat or raht ( right), tahm (time)
No /r/ sound - mow (more), dough (door), flow (floor)
No /th/ sound - substitutes d or f for th (souf - south, mouf-mouth,norf-north--dis (this) dat (that) dem (them)
Vowel plus /ng/ rendered as /ang/ - thang, sang, rang
Contraction of going rendered as gon - he was gon tell but changed he mind
The three answers that come to mind are
(1) IPA is not ASCII based - the
turned e and turned c are simply not available;
(2) IPA is visually disruptive and
according to you, typographically unpleasant (ugly), and
(3) IPA requires ESL students to
learn two different notations.
As an ITA, IPA does not chart an
easy path from a phonemic notation to the
traditional notation. There are
some pages that compare several of the World English
transcriptions with ITA. The
one that is the most like TES is Saxon-Spanglish
What does IPA look like in a long
passage? Some old text samples can be found at
http://pages.whowhere.com/community/sbett/map-IPA.html#alt-not
The original purpose of this discussion
group was to find a way to narrow
the gap between the spoken and written
word while at the same time not
augmenting the alphabet beyond what
was available in Latin 1.
[to view the Latin I character set,
go to
http://victorian.fortunecity.com/vangogh/555/Spell/sitemap-l.html
http://victorian.fortunecity.com/vangogh/555/Spell/latin-1.html
This may be one reason why your call
for an augmented alphabet has been
given such a cool reception.
It would be nice to have 10 new characters but
we tend to be stuck with the existing
keyboard.
It so hard to find an audience for
any reform proposal. Most spelling
reformers want to avoid any red
flags. Requiring a special font is seen as
a red flag: something that
would cause a potential convert to reject the
proposal without further consideration.
There is only one discussion group
that I know of that is into augmented
alphabets - The Shavian alphabet
group at http://www.egroups.com/group/shavian.
Some more rationale:
English is only 40% phonemic (i.e.,
only 40% alphabetic and consistent).
This is an affront to logic and
makes learning unnecessarily difficult and
frustrating. The consistency of
English spelling can be easily improved.
There are three popular approaches
to the problem of the restoring the
alphabet. We say restore because
Old English was 90% alphabetic.
1.Eliminate redundant letters
- almost every letter is redundant and silent in some word
2.Eliminate code overlaps
- no letter or digraph should have more than one pronunciation.
3.Eliminate all inconsistencies
- 1-to-1 correspondence between graphemes & phonemes.
Obviously, to achieve 3 one either has to resort to digrafs or add new letter forms.
Spelling Reformers typically want
to write with a dictionary pronunciation
guide rather than traditional English
spelling. They want the spelling
system to be nearly 100% alphabetic
instead of 40%.
English spelling is hard because
there are too many orthographic
options (Hanna, 1962). Typically
there are 14 different ways to spell a
particular sound (Dewey, 1971).
This means that a simple word such as
scissors /sizerz/ can be spelled
14x14x14x14x14x14 ways. Ellis calculated
this and it came to over a half
million. (Dewey, 1971) Only one of the
500,000 ways to spell /sizerz/ is
lexically correct. In Spanish, or any
highly phonemic writing system,
there is only one or two ways to spell a
sound.
Electronic Pre Prints eprint
Language
Resources http://www.alt-usage-english.org/categorized_links.shtml
