Teenage speak and beyond

[Paul Johnston]

Yes, indeed--and it looks like its different parts may have started
in different places too (Johnston, 1993 in Diachronica)--- on the
basis of spellings in the Linguistic Atlas of Late Middle English and
the Survey of Middle English Dialects, the movement of /i: e: o: u:/
(BITE MEET BOOT OUT) may have started (about 1300?) in a number of
places, including the Northwest (British) Midlands, South
Lincolnshire and the Somerset/Devon area and spreads throughout the
British Isles by 1500, while the movement of /a: E: O:/ and the
diphthong /au/ (MATE BEAT COAT LAW) starts in the area around York
VERY early--13th c. sometime for /a:/ raising, but spreads very
slowly and is resisted when anything like a Standard pronunciation
model comes into being until the early 17th century.  The two shifts--
and there are people like Stockwell & Minkova who will deny that they
are real chain shifts out there too--look like they intertwined
during the course of spread.
        Other Germanic languages have analogs to the GVS that are also often
composed of several "Small Vowel Shifts" historically.  Sometimes
they intertwine (as in the Central German dialects), sometimes they
don't (as in Bavarian),and sometimes there's only an equivalent to
the low/low-mid vowel raising (as in Limburgs and some Low German
dialects).

Paul Johnston
On Jun 1, 2007, at 6:52 PM, Alice Faber wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Alice Faber <faber at HASKINS.YALE.EDU>
> Organization: Haskins Laboratories
> Subject:      Re: Teenage speak and beyond
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>
> Aside from that, the various rotations of the Great Vowel Shift took
> place over the course of several centuries. It's only with a time
> remove
> of half a millennium that it's possible (albeit not very sensible) to
> see the GVS as a single, mammoth shift.
>
> Dennis Preston wrote:
>> The rotations are very similar to the Great Vowel Shift indeed, but
>> why would one think that it was dormant all those years? The natural
>> forces on vowel shifts seem ubiquitous; the social forces are another
>> matter (which is where this discussion started).
>>
>> dInIs
>>
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>>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>> Poster:       Marc Sacks <msacks at THEWORLD.COM>
>>> Subject:      Re: Teenage speak and beyond
>>> --------------------------------------------------------------------
>>> -----------
>>>
>>>
>>>>  Poster:       "Landau, James" <James.Landau at NGC.COM>
>>>>  Isn't this nothing more than a continuation of the Great Vowel
>>>> Shift,
>>>>  re-emerging after about three centuries in a beyance?
>>>>
>>>>     - Jim Landau
>>>
>>> Wow! Three centuries? Who dug up the beyance after all these years?
>>>
>>> Or are three centuries in a beyance like four men in a balloon?
>>>
>>> Marc
>>> msacks at theworld.com
>>>
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>
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