Great Vowel Shift

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Great Vowel Shift

n.
A series of phonetic changes occurring in Early Modern English in which the Middle English low and mid long vowels were raised, (ä) and (ō) becoming (ā) and (o͞o), for example, while the high long vowels (ē) and (o͞o) became the diphthongs (ī) and (ou).
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Great Vowel Shift

n
(Phonetics & Phonology) linguistics a phonetic change that took place during the transition from Middle to Modern English, whereby the long vowels were raised (eː became iː, oː became uː, etc). The vowels (iː) and (uː) underwent breaking and became the diphthongs (aɪ) and (aʊ)
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

Great′ Vow′el Shift′


n.
a series of changes in the quality of the long vowels between Middle and Modern English as a result of which all were raised, while the high vowels (ē) and (o̅o̅), already at the upper limit, underwent breaking to become the diphthongs (ī) and (ou).
Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary, © 2010 K Dictionaries Ltd. Copyright 2005, 1997, 1991 by Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.
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References in periodicals archive
Linguists have long established that nasal vowels have undergone a counterclockwise vowel shift in NMF.
Redressing the tendency to ignore formalities of grammar in language teaching, they rehearse a number of the fundamental principles such as the a/e vowel shift so typical of Hebrew and categories of nouns.
I explained to them that the pronunciation pre-dated the Great Vowel Shift, a technicality not explored in the press coverage.
There are detailed descriptions of each historical period of English, with specific areas in each time period, such as the Great Vowel Shift, chosen for detailed study.
Quiz of the Day ANSWERS: 1 Australia - the Great Barrier Reef; 2 Rouen; 3 Mycroft; 4 X and y; 5 He ran in bare feet; 6 British Airways and Air France; 7 Tamla Records (Motown); 8 The Great Vowel Shift; 9 In the eye; 10 Maureen Connolly.
The following can thus be hypothesized: a) non-random vowel-size rankings in such pairs as [I]~[ae] but not [I]~[i:] would both support three levels of height and invalidate the SPE Vowel Shift Rule (by virtue of which [I]~[i:] would derive from underlying /i/~/e/); b) non-random vowel-size rankings in such pairs as [I]~[ae] and [I]~[i:] would support three levels of vowel height within the SPE Vowel Shift paradigm (i.e.
Now meet an even more rarefied form, the PHONIC DOUBLE VOWEL SHIFT CASCADE, a ten-step ladder running through two sounds per vowel, aAeEiIoOuU--a short (or other non-long) vowel sound followed by a long.
The resulting monophthongs became the input to the diphthongisation rule, a part of the Great Vowel Shift. On the basis of forty-nine Middle English poetic texts from the Chadwyck-Healey online corpus un effort is made here to establish temporal and dialectal conditioning of the change.
The latter observation should make us a bit cautious when interpreting our data; while it may be true that the forms in the first column represent an earlier pronunciation of these words (whether derived or nonderived), predating a possible vowel shift affecting only the vowels of the stressed syllables, it is equally possible that the vowels in the derived forms have lost their "original" quality or quantity due to destressing.
His biggest strength is his systematic, sequential approach, reminiscent of a skilled detective following clues to reach a solution, which one can see best in the treatment of Open Syllable Lengthening (OSL), the developments of the front vowels (notably Vowels 3, 4, and 8) within the Great Vowel Shift (GVS) complex and the Scottish Vowel Length rule (SVLR), covering developments vowel by vowel, environment by environment, resolutely and doggedly.
The rise of [??] can be best described in the framework of the development of an asymmetrical 3+4+2 system of long vowels (the figures designate the number of high, mid and low vowels, respectively) by means of the vowel shift [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] into a more or less symmetrical 3+3+3 system.
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