Great Vowel Shift

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).

Great Vowel Shift

(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)

Great′ Vow′el Shift′

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).

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sound shift

References in periodicals archive ?

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.

English historical linguistics; an international handbook; v.1

The resulting monophthongs became the input to the diphthongisation rule, a part of the Great Vowel Shift.

The monophthongisation of diphthongs before dorsal fricatives: a corpus study

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.

A. Jack Aitken, Older Scottish Vowels

In academic circles, this progression is frequently called "the great vowel shift.

Whither English?: Language Shifts With Cultural Changes

It is not, however, an academic text, so it is inevitable that some subjects, such as the Great Vowel Shift - a fifteenth century phenomenon in which long vowels came to be pronounced with greater elevation of the tongue so they sound more like we would pronounce today -are skimmed over when they are critical to understanding the development of English.

BOOKS: Minding your language; The Adventure of English: 500AD -2000AD: The Biography of a Language by Melvyn Bragg, Hodder and Stoughton, pounds 20. Reviewed by Jayne Howarth

Concretamente, el Great Vowel Shift se interpreta, siguiendo otra vez la propuesta de Dick Leith (1983: 145-149), en relacion con la estratificacion social existente en Londres durante la epoca Tudor.

Fennell, Barbara A. 2001: A History of English. A Sociolinguistic Approach

In between Chaucer and Shakespeare came that perplexing phenomenon, The Great Vowel Shift.

A Way with Words: The Language of English Renaissance Literature

3) The development of a short variant of smeir after this stage of the Great Vowel Shift was complete would give /smir/.

A possible etymology for Scots Smirr 'traces of rain in the wind.'

He ends with the Great Vowel Shift, a change that created our modern pronunciation and destroyed phonetic spelling.

A linguistic introduction to the history and structure of the English lexicon

This term was introduced by Wells (1982: 256) to refer to the most recent ongoing developments associated with the Great Vowel Shift in which these diphthongs/i:, u:, ei, ou, ai, au/show continuing movement of their first elements, beyond those reached by RP, so:

The historical sociolinguistics of elite accent change: on why RP is not disappearing

The dating of the Great Vowel Shift seems inexplicably early, the account of medieval French stress is probably oversimplified, and the use of the term 'perfective' is incorrect.

A Book of Middle English

It must be emphasised that the number of books and papers in all linguistic literature on only one change, the Great Vowel Shift, outnumbers significantly all studies on the history of English consonants.