Great Vowel Shift

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Erfurt (Sprachwissenschaft), course: Regionale Varietäten, language: English, abstract: Every language changes over time. Due to historical, political and social events, like population shifts or movements, a language develops and becomes versatile, as intralinguistic variations emerge between different regions and dialects. One of the most important changes in the English language, which appeared especially in the south of England during the 15th to 18th centuries, was a Chain Shift, the so-called Great Vowel Shift.[INT1] A Chain Shift is “a change in the position of two phonemes in which one moves away from an original position that is occupied by the other.”(Labov 1994: 118) The linguist William Labov classifies three principles, which are applicable to all the Chain Shifts: Principle I: long vowels rise (as in the Great Vowel Shift) Principle II: short vowels fall Principle IIa: the nuclei of upgliding diphthongs fall Principle III: back vowels move to the front (Labov 1994:116)

This thorough analysis of documented Middle English spelling establishes when and where long-vowel change took place.

Pittsburgh toilet, squeaky cheese, city chicken, shampoo banana, and Chevy in the Hole are all phrases that are familiar to Midwesterners but sound foreign to anyone living outside the region. This book explains not only what Midwesterners say but also how and why they say it and covers such topics as: the causes of the Northern cities vowel shift, why the accents in Fargo miss the nasality that's a hallmark of Minnesota speech, and why Chicagoans talk more like people from Buffalo than their next-door neighbors in Wisconsin. Readers from the Midwest will have a better understanding of why they talk the way they do, and readers who are not from the Midwest will know exactly what to say the next time someone ends a sentence with "eh?".

This book covers the historical development of the English phonological system from its earliest reconstructed and recorded forms to its most recent variations.

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Erfurt (Sprachwissenschaft), course: Regionale Varietäten, language: English, abstract: Every language changes over time. Due to historical, political and social events, like population shifts or movements, a language develops and becomes versatile, as intralinguistic variations emerge between different regions and dialects. One of the most important changes in the English language, which appeared especially in the south of England during the 15th to 18th centuries, was a Chain Shift, the so-called Great Vowel Shift.[INT1] A Chain Shift is "a change in the position of two phonemes in which one moves away from an original position that is occupied by the other."(Labov 1994: 118) The linguist William Labov classifies three principles, which are applicable to all the Chain Shifts: Principle I: long vowels rise (as in the Great Vowel Shift) Principle II: short vowels fall Principle IIa: the nuclei of upgliding diphthongs fall Principle III: back vowels move to the front (Labov 1994:116)