Why English spelling makes no sense
English spelling was frozen just as the language’s vowels were changing, so the spelling records an accent nobody has had for centuries.
Read Chaucer aloud as he wrote it (c. 1390) and it sounds almost like another language. The difference is mostly in the vowels.
Over about three centuries, English long vowels moved up and forward in the mouth, like a chain of people each taking the next seat:
| Word | Around 1400 | Today |
|---|---|---|
| bite | “beet” | “bite” |
| meet | “mate” | “meet” |
| house | “hoose” | “house” |
| name | “nah-muh” | “name” |
The worst possible timing
William Caxton set up England’s first printing press in 1476, right in the middle of the shift. Printers began to standardise spellings that reflected older pronunciations, and the spellings stayed put while the sounds kept moving. The Danish linguist Otto Jespersen named the change the “Great Vowel Shift”.
It is also why English vowel letters have different values from most other European languages. To an Italian, “i” sounds like “ee”, which is what it once sounded like in English too.
Nobody fully knows why it happened. Theories include population movement after the Black Death, and social climbing, with people imitating prestige accents. The cause is still debated.
Bring it up
“Chaucer would have pronounced ‘name’ closer to ‘nah-muh’. English spelling still shows how he said it.”
Follow the thread
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