Conference thebay::joyoflex

        It sounds horribly like something to do with the
        discovery of an extremely potent laxative :-).

    I believe you mean the "Great Vole Shift" of 1403, when twenty thousand
    small furry rodents threw themselves over Beachy Head in a single night. The
    Pied Piper was implicated but never brought to trial.
    
    On the other hand...
    
    I know nothing, but it sounds interesting. I've often heard it said
    that American English sounds more like Medieval English than English
    English does (still with me?). I wonder if this is related.
    
    Andy

               It does sound interesting but I think we need one
               of the real language experts to contribute.
               Regarding the fact that American English is nearer to
               Medieval English than British English I read in "The
               State of the Language"(English Observed) [can't remember
               the name of the author but he is , I believe, the current
               literary editor of the Times] that certain words and
               their pronunciation at least in the American English
               of the New England States are very definately Elizabethan
               English usage which has been conserved there but died
               out in the U.K.
               One of the words was 'fall' for autumn to which I referred
               in a previous note.
    
                                                 Max

>    I have heard obscurely of the Great Vowel Shift.  I gather it was a
>    change in English pronunciation that took place very quickly around
>    1400. 

    That's about as much as I can remember, but I never studied the
    history of English. Whatever I once knew is contained in a book
    by somebody Foster, I think: _The_Changing_English_Language.
    I don't think anyone has a quick one-line explanation, tho'
    I'm sure people who know the details don't find them surprising!
    
    Incidentally, a Malcolm Bradbury novel (_Rates_of_Exchange_)
    has a vowel shift in it.  A visiting English academic in an
    Eastern bloc country wakes up one morning to find that there
    has been a bloodless linguistic revolution overnight.  No one
    can explain it, but there's a suspicion that the reason is
    political.
    
    A similar thing happened to sibilants in Castilian a few decades
    earlier - equally unexplained.
    
    b

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Note 444.5                    The Great Vowel Shift                       5 of 5
WELSWS::MANNION "Rainy City Blues"                    9 lines   3-DEC-1987 10:22
                            -< A simplistic answer >-
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    The phrase was coined by Jespersen to describe the phenomenon of
    all the highest vowels becoming diphthongs (such as the "i" in machine
    becoming the "i" in mice), and other vowels all moving to a
    correspondingly higher position.
    
    It accounts for many of the anomalies of English spelling - which
    is not something we want to get into again, I feel.
    
    Phillip

    Thank you.  Any idea what caused it or how long it took?
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    Re .3: Philip Howard used to be the Literary Editor of the Times
    - he may still be, but I haven't seen anything from him lately.
    Maybe he's on holiday. Confirmation - it is PH, (at least The Times
    think so - I phoned them).

              Thank you Richard.
              The book is by Philip Howard.
    
                                            Max

    I think the Encyclopedia Britanica says the great vowel shift took
    a matter of months!  And without TV anchorpersons at that!