Early modern english grammar

A major factor separating Middle English from Modern English is known as the Great Vowel Shift, a radical change in pronunciation during the 15th, 16th and 17th Century, as a result of which long vowel sounds began to be made higher and further forward in the mouth short vowel sounds were largely unchanged. In fact, the shift probably started very gradually some centuries before , and continued long after some subtle changes arguably continue even to this day.

Many languages have undergone vowel shifts, but the major changes of the English vowel shift occurred within the relatively short space of a century or two, quite a sudden and dramatic shift in linguistic terms. It was largely during this short period of time that English lost the purer vowel sounds of most European languages, as well as the phonetic pairing between long and short vowel sounds.

The causes of the shift are still highly debated, although an important factor may have been the very fact of the large intake of loanwords from the Romance languages of Europe during this time, which required a different kind of pronunciation. It was, however, a peculiarly English phenomenon, and contemporary and neighbouring languages like French, German and Spanish were entirely unaffected.

It affected words of both native ancestry as well as borrowings from French and Latin. In Middle English for instance in the time of Chaucer , the long vowels were generally pronounced very much like the Latin-derived Romance languages of Europe e.

Early modern english sentences

After the Great Vowel Shift, the pronunciations of these and similar words would have been much more like they are spoken today. The changes also proceeded at different times and speeds in different parts of the country. The Great Vowel Shift gave rise to many of the oddities of English pronunciation, and now obscures the relationships between many English words and their foreign counterparts.