PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY
Segmental Aspects

It is important to be aware of some quality changes in the system of English vowels from the historical point of view, because the vowel system was not always stable. It has undergone some turbulent changes throughout history.

At the end of the Middle English period which lasted from the beginning of the 12^th century until the middle of the 15^th century (Crystal, 2011, p. 30), the vowel system was very much affected by the changes known as the Great Vowel Shift. As Crystal states, “the changes affected the seven long vowels: /i:/,/e:/, /ɛ:/, /u:/, /o:/, /ͻ:/ and /a:/… and each vowel changed its sound quality” (Crystal, 2011, p. 55).

The Great Vowel Shift had an enormous impact on the English language. “If printing had come a century later, or the Great Vowel Shift a century earlier, the present-day spelling system would be vastly more regular than it has turned out to be. As it is, the spelling of thousands of words now reflects the pronunciation of vowels as they were in Chaucer´s time. Name, for example, has an a because in Middle English it was pronounced with an /a:/ vowel (like that of modern calm). The change to /e/ during the 15^th century was ignored by the printers. And the same kind of reasoning explains the many silent letters of modern spelling (such as in knee and time), where the letter ceased to be sounded after the printing conventions had been established” (Crystal, 2011, p. 275).

This important phenomenon in the British history is discussed by numerous linguists dealing with the changes in the English sound system across centuries, namely for example Crystal in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (Crystal, 2011, p. 55).