10. Name, Time, Knight: The Great Vowel Shift and Silent Letters

Star-Spangled Stories. Article 10.

Name, Time, Knight: The Great Vowel Shift and Silent Letters

Why name is not read "nah-meh" and time not "tee-meh", who put letters nobody pronounces into words, and why the Czech way of reading English words is not silly, just five hundred years late.

Every beginner has been there: they read name as "nah-meh", time as "tee-meh" and knife with a k at the beginning. The teacher corrects them, and they wonder why English writes differently from how it speaks. The good news: if they had lived in London around 1400, they would have read it correctly.

In the article Why Isn't English Written the Way It Sounds? we saw that English spelling is like a museum that nobody ever tidied up. Today we will look at its two biggest exhibits: the Great Vowel Shift, which changed the pronunciation of thousands of words, and silent letters, which stayed in spelling as traces of sounds that died out long ago – but sometimes also as the result of a scholar's mistake.

A Czech pronunciation that is actually medieval

The Latin script came to England with Christian missionaries. Its letters had the same values as in Latin, and so similar values to those in Czech, German or Italian today: a as in Czech á, e as é, i as í, o as ó, u as ú. When a medieval scribe wrote name, he read it roughly as "nah-meh". Time was "tee-meh", house (written hous) was "hoos" and moon was "mohn".

So Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote around 1390, would understand a Czech student better than a modern American. The spelling of English words largely records the pronunciation that English had before the Great Vowel Shift. But then the pronunciation changed and the spelling stood still.

What actually happened

Roughly between 1400 and 1700, the pronunciation of all the long vowels of English gradually changed. Short vowels (as in cat, bed, sit, hot, cup) stayed almost the same. But the long vowels "moved up": the tongue rose higher in the mouth when they were pronounced. And the ones that were already at the top and could not go any higher turned into diphthongs.

Imagine it as a game of musical chairs. The vowels sit on a row of chairs from the lowest to the highest. The one at the top (ee, oo) gets up and leaves as a diphthong. The others move up one chair. The result is that the whole system changed at once, and yet each word kept its place in relation to the others.

Why did it happen?

The name Great Vowel Shift was invented by the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen in his book A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles (1909). But what started the shift is still debated today.

Linguists argue whether it was a "pull" or a "push". According to one theory, the highest ee and oo first turned into diphthongs and made room, so the other vowels were "pulled" up (drag chain). According to the other, the lower vowels rose first and "pushed out" the higher ones (push chain). Perhaps both happened at the same time in different areas.

There are several explanations for the cause itself. After the plague epidemics of the 14th century, many people moved to London from the countryside and East Anglia. Their dialects mixed, and some pronunciations may have started to sound "modern" or "better". Other researchers stress the wish of rising social classes to set themselves apart by their pronunciation. But we do not know for sure. We only know that the shift took about three hundred years and did not happen the same way everywhere: in the north of England and in Scotland some vowels have stayed unchanged to this day.

Traces of the shift in vocabulary

The Great Vowel Shift affected only long vowels. But many words have relatives in which the vowel had already become short, for example because another syllable was added. These words did not go through the shift. That is why in English today we find whole pairs where the same letter sounds different each time:

For a student this is a useful key. Knowing how to pronounce nation does not mean you will pronounce national the same way. But the spelling tells you that the words are related, and that is actually an advantage of unchanging spelling.

The shift was not completely regular. The words great, break and steak stopped at /eɪ/ instead of rising all the way to /i/ like meat or speak. And blood or good went through another shortening after the shift, as we saw in the article Why Isn't English Written the Way It Sounds? The regularity of a language is always only approximate.

Silent letters: who put them there?

Now for the second part of our story. Silent letters – letters that we write but do not pronounce – came about in four different ways. Each group has a different story.

a) Letters left by lost sounds

The oldest group. These letters were once pronounced, but the pronunciation changed before the spelling became fixed. In knight (Old English cniht), the first k was still pronounced in Shakespeare's time and disappeared only in the 17th century. The same goes for knee, know, knife. The first w disappeared in write, wrong, wrist, the final b after m in lamb, climb, comb, and the throaty sound written gh in night, light, daughter.

b) Letters added by scholars

In the 15th and 16th centuries, Renaissance scholars wanted to show that English words had a noble Latin origin. So they added letters from Latin to words that had come from French without them. Nobody pronounced them, before or after.

The last row is the funniest. The word island has nothing to do with Latin insula or French isle. It comes from Old English īegland ("island land"). The scholars made a mistake and put in an s that never belonged there. The same with could: medieval coude got an l only to look like would and should, in which the l was once really pronounced.

c) Letters from foreign languages

The third group came with borrowings. Greek words kept the groups ps-, pn-, rh-: psychology /saɪˈkɑləʤi/, pneumonia /nuˈmoʊnjə/, rhythm /ˈrɪðəm/. French words kept their silent final consonants: ballet /bæˈleɪ/, debris /dəˈbri/. By the way, the word rhyme was once spelled rime. It got its h in the 16th and 17th centuries because people connected it with Greek rhythm.

d) Letters that work in silence

Some silent letters do a useful job in spelling, even though they are not pronounced themselves. The best known is the so-called magic e at the end of a word. It is not pronounced, but it tells us that the vowel before it is "long", that is, pronounced the post-shift way: hop /hɑp/ × hope /hoʊp/, cut /kʌt/ × cute /kjut/, bit /bɪt/ × bite /baɪt/. It is a direct legacy of the vowel shift. In the same way, the u in guess and guitar is not pronounced, but it stops the g from being read as /ʤ/.

American or British silence?

American and British English differ in some silent letters. The best-known example is herb. Americans say /ɝb/ without the h, the British say /hɜːb/ with the h. Surprisingly, it is the Americans who kept the older pronunciation. The letter h in French borrowings was silent for a long time, and the British began to pronounce it only in the 19th century.

You know the opposite case from the article Where Did the R Go? In British English, r at the end of a syllable is silent (car, park), while in American English, which this course uses, it is pronounced. For an American, the r in car is as alive as it is for a Czech.

Sometimes a silent letter comes back into pronunciation because people see it in the spelling. This is called spelling pronunciation. In often, the t was silent for hundreds of years, but today many Americans and British people pronounce it again: both /ˈɔfən/ and /ˈɔftən/ are correct.

Why does nobody fix the spelling?

There have been many attempts. Around 1800, Noah Webster simplified American spelling (color, center). In 1906, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie funded the Simplified Spelling Board, and President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the government printing office to use 300 simplified forms, for example thru or tho. Congress rebelled and Roosevelt had to withdraw the order within a few months.

There are several reasons why reforms fail. Hundreds of millions of people with very different pronunciations speak English, so it would not be clear whose pronunciation to follow. The old spelling also separates words that sound the same: knight × night, know × no, write × right, whole × hole. And it shows how words are related, as we saw with sign and signature.

Conclusion: spelling as a time capsule

Next time you wonder why name is not read "nah-meh", remember that it really was read that way once. English spelling is a time capsule: its vowels keep the pronunciation of Chaucer's time, and its silent letters recall lost sounds, Renaissance scholars and foreign languages. If you know these stories, you do not have to learn silent letters as a random list. You can read them as traces of history.