Teenage speak and beyond

[Alice Faber]

James A. Landau wrote:
>
> I am certainly not an expert on the Great Vowel Shift, but when I first read about it, as a senior in college, the book I was reading said that the GVS had to have been a single process, albeit erratic and long-drawn-out.  Had one English vowel rotated while others remained static, English would have ended up with that vowel merging with its "target", which has not occurred.
>

Well, I'm no expert either, but from the reading I've done, especially
about various British dialects, it's only when all you look at is London
English that you can get away with claiming that there were no mergers.
It's kind of hard to abstract this information from _The Survey of
English Dialects_, since it's organized around lexical items and not
phonological systems. But, it *is* there. And if you look at the
outcomes of the various ME vowels participating in the GVS, you find a
wild variety of outcomes, both in phonetic quality and in the number
(and types) of surviving vowel contrasts. As Paul noted elsewhere in
this thread, when you take the dialect evidence into account, it's
abundantly clear that different changes subsumed in the GVS started in
different parts of England, some as early as the 13th C CE and some as
late as the 17th; that not all changes occurred in all areas of England;
and that in areas that were affected by all changes, the changes
occurred in different orders. So to address the point alleged in your
college book: there were indeed mergers in some areas that didn't occur
in the ancestor of "standard" (i.e., London) English, and these mergers
occurred precisely because of the interactions of the various discrete
changes involved in the overall GVS.

--
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Alice Faber
faber at haskins.yale.edu
Haskins Laboratories                                  tel: (203)
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