This accent sticks out, however, because it provides a case study in how languages change. Chances are, though, you haven’t heard it, because it’s only spoken in one small part of the country. It can be pretty jarring to hear it and find out the people who speak with the accent were actually born in the United States. The High Tider accent - sometimes written “Hoi Toider” to reflect the way it’s pronounced by those with the accent - sounds kind of Australian, kind of Irish and kind of British. There is one accent here, however, that sounds different: High Tider, or the Ocracoke brogue. Over time, these morphed and changed to become the Boston accent, the Southern accent, or any of the other accents you can hear spoken in the United States. They sounded German, or Dutch, or British, and so on. After all, none of our ancestors who immigrated here spoke with these accents. That may seem pretty self-evident, but it’s not. So phase one of the GVS seems to have happened in both German and English.Almost all of the accents in the United States sound American. I believe in proto-west-Germanic you had something like /hu:s/ and /bi:t/, and in modern west Germanic languages you have something like /haus/ and /bait/ or /bais/ (with the later shift from t to s in German). Why is it that the /ɛ:/ vowel ( the long vowel spelt ) moved to position 2 in words like steak, but to position 1 in words like speak? Is it just unpredictable? I love the way you’ve shown that most of it actually *is* predictable, even if it appears chaotic at first sight.ĭo you know why represents a short /ɛ/ sound in a word like head? Normally we spell it, for example in bed.ĭo you think the first phase of the GVS could have started before English diverged from High German? If you think of words like Haus and beiß, they have the same vowel in modern German as they do in modern English. I’ve recently discovered it and binged my way through the first 50, but I listened to the Great Vowel Shift ones as soon as they came out. Thank you Kevin for your wonderful podcast! I love it. Since the “y” in “glory” is actually standing in for “i” in that final position and being pronounced as /i/, when the suffix “-ous” is added to glory, the “i” is substituted for “y” because it is no longer in the final position. I think the word final pronunciation of “y” as /i/ is a relic of the past when the letter ‘i’ was commonly pronounced as /i/ before the GVS. So, since the letter “y” stands in for “i” in word final positions (because native English words cannot end in “i”), it could assume both ‘long’ pronunciations of “i”: /aı/ and /i/. Only long vowel phonemes and the neutral vowel called ‘schwa’ /ə/ occur in word final positions. I started studying English phonotactics to under that the short vowel phonemes like /a/, and /ı/ do not end English words. You would sometimes hear people pronounce “pin” as /pin/ rhyming it with “teen”.Īnd then I started studying English phonology and the phonological representation of words like ‘Many’, ‘pity, ‘glory’ and the rest made no sense to me. Most of us struggle with the distinction between the phonemes /ı/ as in “hill” /hıl/ and /i/ in ‘heel’ /hil/. I am a Ghanaian, so I learned English as a second language. This is an interesting question: one that puzzled me for years. All of my known ancestors were born in Ireland or Australia My father turned one the week after he arrived in Brisbane in Oct 1883. That is something her children could not claim. My mother used boast that BOTH her parents were born in Australia. I still cannot pronounce the name of the broadcaster RTE. I soon learned that there is no letter in the alphabet that I pronounce “A” I was in Buncrana Donegal from Late Nov 1999 to Sep 2000 and sometimes had problems on the phone and often asked people to spell a name. That was such an understatement that I had devoured more than seventy episodes in less than a month and then I found myself waiting impatiently for your next contribution, but I have not commented for some time – not that I have ever been disappointed in any episode be it linguist or historical. You were into the seventies as episodes when my daughter drew my attention to your podcast with the laconic comment that I might find it interesting. This is for me the most exciting episode.
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