Hint: George Bernard Shaw
Answer: The Great Vowel Shift. The second picture showed Chaucer's General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales which is written in Middle English. No one really knows how Middle English is pronounced but end vowel sounds are not dropped which makes delightful reading. The Vowel Shift occurred after the Tales were written which resulted in some really un-phonetic pronunciation of words in Modern English. The hint to GBS was in reference to the disconnect in orthography and pronunciation.
Correctly answered by: Iam, Karthik, Srivats, and Dinesh
6 comments:
Vowel shift
The great vowel shift. The second picture is of Chaucer's Canterbury tales?
The great vowel shift. The words in Chaucer's Canterbury tales don't rhyme as well when viewed as modern English. This often gives linguists clues as to how these vowels were originally pronounced in middle English and how they have evolved since. The first visual is a diagrammatic representation of this phenomenon with the trapezoid being the mouth and the location of the vowels indicating the position of the tongue when pronouncing them.
the great english vowel shift
The visual looks very much like the IPA charts for pronouncing vowels. I don't know about the second.
Something to do with Cockney slang?
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