Talk:Great Vowel Shift

Request link to explanation of vowel symbols

Like others who have posted above, I can't understand the table on this page. (And that's a shame beacuse I find the subject fascinating.)

This problem would be easily solved with a link (just above the table) to a list of all the vowel symbols, showing how to pronounce them. But where is such a list? I've searched Wikipedia and the only thing I could find was this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language (under the 'Vowels' section) However, that list seems quite different to the vowel sounds used in the table here, with many symbols not listed.

Clearly, the symbols used in one of these two pages is either wrong, or incomplete. Someone needs to fix it!

Grand Dizzy (talk) 20:33, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

The table looks OK to me (and is extremely helpful, well done to whoever put it up). Everything in it is IPA, but many of the symbols are inevitably not in the English language article, as they are historic rather than present-day English sounds. The reader will need to look at the full IPA article to understand the symbols, but I think that's preferable to giving a dumbed-down version which only gives vague approximations.

My only criticism is that the typeface for the symbols is too small (and can't be adjusted) for it to be clear what exactly is underneath the eː in 1500 and the oː in 1700 and 1750. I assume it's the "lowered" diacritic (shaped like a T), but can't tell for sure. Vilĉjo (talk) 16:08, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

I`m sorry that you think that having examples would be "dumbed down". Like the user who follows, I am an amateur at phonetics. I don't consider myself to be that "dumb"; I'm an educated person with a university degree, but I don't know the IPA alphabet and I rather imagine that most non-specialists who use Wikipedia for information are in the same situation. Linguists fluent and conversant in IPA symbology probably don't come to Wikipedia for this information; they've learned it elsewhere and/or have access to specialised references. It is, I think, rather too much to ask that the reader look up several different articles and tables in order to understand the concepts that this article is trying to explain. For myself, and – I suspect – many other users, the tables with only IPA vowels shown /vowel/ is close to meaningless. I (we) don't know what sounds are meant by those symbols. If those meanings are unknown to the reader, then the symbols become useless, and the reader is just left without any understanding, and therefore, unenlightened about what the Great Vowel Shift is actually about. I've left this article with only a vague grasp of how the great vowel shift changed the sound of spoken English, and isn't the point of an encyclopædic article to inform the reader? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.54.253.142 (talk) 00:37, 2 July 2020 (UTC)

I am a rank amateur in phonetics. Please consider this example from the summary above the main chart:

Middle English [ɛː] raised to [eː] and then to modern English [iː] (as in beak).

I can find no reference to the Middle English [ɛː] symbol in any Wiki-supplied SAMPA or IPA chart. Yet the OED guide to pronunciation has precisely this symbol which it describes as pronounced like the 'are' in 'square'. To have to go to the main IPA article in Wikipedia and find out that the colon-like symbol following the epsilon-like symbol makes the preceding sound 'long' is not a clue that helps me lengthen the 'e' in 'bed' which is how the IPA indicates the epsilon-like IPA symbol is pronounced. It would have been helpful if each stage was followed by a word in modern English that sounds like the Middle English. Given that the article provides a phonetic combo of symbols for which the OED finds perfectly easily a modern examplar, couldn't the article be modified to do the same?

The article needs to have EVERY phonetic symbol it displays provided with a modern English example or a brief explanation of what modern English sound(s) approximate it.

This is a fascinating subject that an amateur ought to be able to work out from the article w/o spending days excavating sources to find information.

I have no complaints about the article other than this one, which is kind of central - how the heck did the actual sounds change?

What about having little sound-bytes for each sound at each stage of the GVS? Ken M Quirici 16:43, 26 December 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kquirici (talk • contribs)

It is a weakness of Wikipedia that pronunciation is such a difficult issue. Many times I have followed a pronunciation link and given up quickly. Definitely the tables in this article need the old vowel sounds explained with reference to words we know. Timmytimtimmy (talk) 02:27, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

First, you've got the International Phonetic Alphabet article, and second, each of the sounds has its own article where there is usually a recording of it (not always quite accurate, but never mind). And there is a link to an IPA table with recordings also in the external links section of the IPA article (typically better than that on Wikipedia). People fluent in IPA do read Wikipedia articles - just because you know IPA doesn't mean you know everything about the phonetics and phonetic history of every single language. We don't want to have our information dumbed down and made less accurate - it would make it harder for us to understand and find out what we want to find out.--62.73.72.3 (talk) 09:31, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

pitched way to high

people an encylopedia should be accesible to the general reader this article is not get thee to rewrite

after reading thru some of the comments, most of them seem to be some variant of what i said: this article is incomprehensible oto 90% of readers

 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:192:4701:BE80:403D:F8F2:7CF0:CEBD (talk) 03:52, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

Yes, the problem with Wikipedia is too many articles like this one, that were written by experts in the subject who never had to teach the subject to beginners. The passion to get every single word of every single sentence technically accurate has meant that accuracy has crowded out intelligibility.

By no means the only article to have this flaw.

Encyclopedia articles need to be understood by people who know nothing of the field. This one fails. Skepticalgiraffe (talk) 00:53, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

I very much agree with this. This page is unfortunately dominated by people who think that just because they put in the effort to learn IPA, everybody else should. As someone who has mastered a large number of different technical notations, if I didn't have better uses for my time, I could no doubt learn IPA, but that would be just as stupid as other people learning HTML and CSS to read the source text of this page without using a web browser. If IPA is really any good there should be automatic tools that enable it to be translated into audio in a wide range of different spoken forms - just select the one that suits you. This is presumably what people who know IPA do in their heads. Wikipedia could then provide access to this just as it provides access to existing audio and video samples. It would then be easy for users to understand all the information on a page like this without having to learn HTML, CCS, JavaScript or IPA! No doubt the idea of having their knowledge encoded into a mere computer program would horrify the average IPAite! 31.50.203.115 (talk) 12:15, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

Well said Timmytimtimmy (talk) 02:28, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

What nonsense. If you can't bother to learn the IPA and don't know much about phonetics, why would you be reading an article about a subject so technical as the Great Vowel Shift in the first place? It clearly is of no concern to you. Would you expect to be able to read about, say, a certain chemical reaction and understand everything in it without some knowledge of the principles of chemistry and its symbols? Why do you expect that everything about language should be more accessible to every layman than a topic in physics and chemistry? Wikipedia isn't a textbook for 12-year-olds, it is trying to be accurate first and foremost. And no, it's not that simple to automatically convert IPA into sound for many reasons. If you are interested in a subject in the area of phonetics, of course you should learn IPA - this isn't comparable to learning HTML just to read this page, which has nothing to do with programming. Your wish is more comparable to being able to read about a specific technical issue in the programming of webpages without knowing HTML. --62.73.72.3 (talk) 09:14, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

'Encyclopedia articles need to be understood by those who know nothing of the field'. A false assumption. An encyclopedia is not a textbook. Ultimately, you can understand everything here if you know stuff that is explained in other articles, but you can't expect to understand everything in every article without needing to know anything in advance. If you read an article about Phnom Penh, you might need to check what Cambodia is - you can't expect the article to be written in a way that doesn't require you to know this. If anything, I'd say the article is pitched too low in that it only mentions those explanations of the causes of the GVS that are easy to understand for non-specialists, however implausible they might be.--62.73.72.3 (talk) 09:23, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

"*all* middle English long vowels were changed"?

What about 'long u' (u:)? As in, rude, or dune. s that vowell not pronounced pretty much the same way that it was in middle English? At most there are some slight dipthonging variations in some dialects, but those aren't great vowellshift related... Firejuggler86 (talk) 20:58, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

I think we're saying here that /u:/ mūs became /aʊ/ mouse. Wolfdog (talk) 19:59, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

'dune' and 'rude' had the diphthong /iw/ in Middle English, not a long monophthong. Changes to this vowel are (to my knowledge) considered to have occurred after the GVS and are mostly conditional and dependent on dialect. ~2025-36139-08 (talk) 00:44, 25 November 2025 (UTC)

Explanations for the great vowel shift

There are a number of structural explanations dealing with the sound structure and mechanics of the language itself, push chains vs drag chains etc. - some mentioned in the cited sources - but the list in this article creates the impression that the only explanations proposed are sociolinguistic speculations - most of which seem rather whimsical, unserious and generally, well, lame. 62.73.72.3 (talk) 08:59, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

I would like to remove Population migration: This is the most accepted theory^{[citation needed]}; unless someone can find a RS to support it.

Any objections? Lukewarmbeer (talk) 10:28, 8 July 2025 (UTC)

It would be great to have a lot more citations, in general, on the possible explanations. Wolfdog (talk) 13:24, 8 July 2025 (UTC)

It would - but in answer to the question? (I can't find anything authoritative to support that statement). Lukewarmbeer (talk) 17:15, 8 July 2025 (UTC)

Causes section

All of these explanations are silly and fail to explain the actual underlying structural causes for the shift. They are largely pop-sci in nature and don't reflect historical linguistic research.

"War with France: An opposing theory states that the wars with France and general anti-French sentiments caused hypercorrection deliberately to make English sound less like French."

Seriously? This explanation makes absolutely no sense (and the others aren't much better), people do not shift vowels over hundreds of years across a massive country for silly reasons like this. It also fails to explain why German underwent many similar shifts (unless going to war with France causes /i:/ and /u:/ to turn into /aʊ/ and /aɪ/, LOL). Hypercorrections usually target individual words or result in the insertion of consonants such as /h/, they do not systematically alter the pronunciation of nearly every vowel in the language like this.

In my opinion this entire section should just be deleted and replaced with actual phonetic/scientific explanations rather than pure nonsense/speculation, vowel shifts like these are subconscious things and aren't deliberate like this section suggests. ~2026-30061-23 (talk) 07:18, 15 June 2026 (UTC)