Great Vowel Shift — part 3

Aug 3, 2010 by

To conclude this series of postings on the Great Vowel Shift let’s look at the possible causes of this wholesale upheaval in the vowel system of English. The question of why the Great Vowel Shift happened can be broken down...

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Great Vowel Shift — part 2

Aug 2, 2010 by

In the last posting in July, I explained the basics of the Great Vowel Shift, a historical process that is responsible for a lot of the “mess” in the English spelling system, as far as vowels are concerned. As you may...

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Great Vowel Shift

Jul 30, 2010 by

In several earlier postings I promised to write about the Great Vowel Shift, so finally the wait is over. The Great Vowel Shift was first studied and described by a Danish linguist and Anglicist Otto Jespersen (1860-1943). He was...

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