Great Vowel Shift

1 March 2002

Perhaps the biggest single change in English pronunciation happened during the transition from Middle English to Modern English. Linguists call this the Great Vowel Shift. The shift began c. 1300 and continued through c. 1700, with the majority of the change occurring in the 15th and 16th centuries. So the language of Chaucer is largely pre-shift and the language of Shakespeare is largely post-shift, although the changes were underway before Chaucer was born and continued on after Shakespeare had died.

During the Great Vowel Shift, English speakers changed the way they pronounced long vowels. Before the shift, English vowels were pronounced in much the same way that they are spoken in modern continental European languages. After the shift, they had achieved their modern phonological values.

For example, a Middle English speaker would pronounce the long e in sheep as we pronounce the word shape today. Fine was pronounced fien (as in fiend). Sea was pronounced like the modern say.

The difference can be seen in similar words that enter English before and after the shift. For example, the long i sound in polite, a word which makes its appearance c. 1450 from the Latin politus, meaning polished, burnished, cultivated underwent the shift. The similarly constructed police, which was borrowed a hundred years later from the Medieval Latin politia, missed the shift and is pronounced in the traditional, continental manner.

Okay, so what exactly changed in the shift? Basically it was a shift in the position of the tongue when the long vowels were pronounced. The shift didn’t affect short vowels, which we pronounce today much like Chaucer did. But with long vowels, the tongue moved up in the mouth and either further forward or back. If you pronounce the letters A and E several times in succession, you can feel your tongue moving forward and back in your mouth. A is a fronted vowel; it is pronounced with the tongue forward. E is a backed vowel, pronounced with the tongue back. After the shift, fronted vowels were pronounced with the tongue higher and further forward than previously and backed vowels were pronounced higher and further back. And the long i and long u sounds, which prior to the shift were already pronounced with the tongue high, became diphthongs—vowel sounds with two distinct elements.

Also, in some words the long vowels e and o shifted to become short vowels, especially in compounds. Hence, we have the difference in pronunciation between bone, from the Old English ban, and bonfire, which is literally a bone fire or funeral pyre. Scotland retained the original pronunciation longer, spelling it bane-fire until c. 1800. Similarly the long e in sheep shortened in the word shepherd.

Now the shift wasn’t completely consistent. Some words resisted the change. Sea shifted, but great and break didn’t. As a result ea has two distinct sounds in English.

The shift wasn’t consistent over different regions either. The shift occurred later and was weaker as you moved northward into the North of England and into Scotland. So Scottish pronunciation is closer to Chaucer’s than is the modern London accent.

Words on the Web: www.oed.com

1 March 2002

What better site to start a feature on language sites on the web than with www.oed.com. The Oxford English Dictionary is, without question, the greatest English language resource either online or off.

The OED provides definitions for over half a million words. It includes 2.5 million quotations demonstrating word usage and historical examples of changes in spelling and form. The OED is the fundamental resource for anyone serious about words and language.

The online edition of the dictionary consists of the second print edition, plus the three volumes of the Additions Series, and continual updates from the third edition as it is written, starting with the letter M. Access is via the web, with a subscriber able to enter his password from any computer with web access.

Features on the site include the ability to email and print entries. But the greatest feature is the search capability. You can conduct a quick search of headwords to identify entries. Or you can conduct advanced searches of particular parts of entries, such as the usage quotations, or even a full-text search. Complete Boolean functionality is provided. The search is flexible, easy to configure, powerful, and very fast.

Navigation through the site is also fast and intuitive. Although I did have some difficulty finding the bibliographic information.

Lest we seem too enthusiastic, the OED is not without its faults. For one, the OED is based on British English. It has a distinct bias toward British usage, sense, and pronunciation. American, Canadian, and Australian dialects are given comparatively short shrift. This is not a fault, but it is a bias that must be taken into account. Even given this bias, though, the OED is so huge that it contains more information on American usage than most American dictionaries.

Another limitation of the OED is caused by the fact that much of the dictionary is around a century old. The online version contains the latest updates, but these account for only a small percentage of entries. It is largely a Victorian dictionary.

The biggest drawback however is price. Access to www.oed.com is expensive. Individual access costs $550/year. Institutional pricing goes up from there. If you don’t have access through an institution, the cost is prohibitive.

The good news on the cost front, however, is that individuals can get access through membership to the Quality Paperback Book Club, www.qpb.com. QPB provides access to the online OED as a membership benefit. There is no additional charge—you just have to buy the number of books necessary to fulfill your member quota.

Ease of access and the search capability make www.oed.com an essential resource for any word maven. It is the single best site on the web for words. The OED isn’t a perfect resource, but it’s as close to perfect as you can get.

Book Review: Safire's Let a Simile Be Your Umbrella

1 March 2002

William Safire is perhaps the most widely read commentator on the English language writing today. His weekly On Language column appears in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. Safire’s column runs the gamut of language issues, covering etymology, usage, and grammar. It focuses on words and phrases that are in vogue or recently used by key political and media figures.

Let a Simile Be Your Umbrella is the 12th in the series of compilations of Safire’s column. Safire has been writing the On Language column since 1979 and turning out these compilation volumes on the average of once every two years since then.

Safire’s column is witty and topical. The wit survives in the compiled volumes, but some of the topicality is lost with the lag between the columns’ appearance in the Times and the publication of the book. Bill Clinton was still president when these columns were written, and the political asides appear a bit dated. The first column in the book for example, addresses language issues surrounding the 1997 Kelly Flinn scandal—the female B-52 pilot who got in trouble over an adulterous affair with an enlisted man. Other columns address verbiage used in the 1996 Clinton-Dole election campaigns. But language changes more slowly than politics and the basic points Safire makes about language remain topical.

The columns are short, quick reads. Most will only need a few minutes for each one. This makes the book ideal for bathroom reading, commuters, or any situation where one’s reading is apt to be interrupted.

Safire is definitely in the prescriptivist camp. He is not shy about rendering judgments about proper grammar and usage. For example, he takes a flight attendant to task for saying “we will be landing momentarily” when she means “we will be landing in a moment,” or better yet “we will be landing soon.” In another case he chides a CEO for discussing a “robust product cycle.” Sales can be robust, but cycles can’t. In most cases his distinctions are more a question of style than correctness, but you have to admire his tenacity in a battle that he will never win.

Safire rarely addresses etymology as a main topic, but often includes etymological comments alongside his usage recommendations. His column on the disappearing “New” in “New Jersey” includes several paragraphs on the origin of the state’s name (most know it comes from the Channel Island of Jersey, but probably don’t know that Jers is a corruption of Caesar and –ey is a suffix denoting an island. So Jersey is Caesar’s island.

In another case he traces the origin of “thinking outside the box” to a 1984 brain teaser created by a group of management consultants to demonstrate how preconceptions can inhibit creativity.

Since it’s a compilation, regular readers of the column will find little new here. One feature that regular readers will appreciate though is the inclusion of reader feedback in the form of letters. Safire includes reader commentary that he received after the column in question appeared in The Times. Often readers contribute additional information and examples of odd usages.

The collection of Safire’s books is a valuable resource for language research. While not intended as reference works, the sheer volume of words and phrases Safire has addressed over the years makes these volumes useful. If you have the earlier volumes, most of which are now out of print and available only through used-book outlets, you’ll want to acquire this one to keep the collection complete. One feature that would be nice would the publication of a consolidated index of all the volumes. Each volume contains its own index, and Simile is no exception, but checking twelve different indices each time you want to look up a word or phrase is a daunting task.

The book is a fun read that covers an eclectic array of tangential topics. It’s exceptional in that it is also very well researched and accurate. Safire seldom makes errors of fact (although you might choose to dispute some of his usage judgments), and these have been corrected in the interim between publication in the newspaper and in the book.

Hardcover. 368 pages. November 2001. Crown Publishers. ISBN: 0609609475. $25.00.

Enron

1 March 2002

Big news stories, especially scandals, often generate a variety of nonce words. Some survive, like the –gate suffix of the Watergate scandal, others disappear into the mists of history. The Enron Scandal is no different. It’s generated a plethora of nonce terms and phrases, or Enronyms, if you will.

The most famous of these, perhaps, is the verb to Enron, coined by Senator Tom Daschle in a CNN interview on 23 January of this year. Comparing the Enron employees’ loss of their pensions to Republican raiding of the Social Security trust fund, Daschle said, “I don’t want to Enron the people of the United States. I don’t want to see them holding the bag at the end of the day just like Enron employees have held the bag.”

In response, Minority Leader Trent Lott responded that he didn’t want to “Daschleize” the budget—meaning to raise taxes.

But Daschle wasn’t the first to verb the name of the company. Several weeks earlier, on 6 January, Waldo Proffitt of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune wrote, “It seems to me an absolute necessity for Congress to pass a law to keep employees of other companies from having their 401K plans Enronized.”

Credit for this trend in nonce nomenclature goes to Ty Meighan of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. Way back on 15 December of last year he wrote, “some described the University of Texas football loss to Colorado—and a chance at the national championship—as a failure of Enronian proportion.”

Meighan beats out Ian McDonald of TheStreet.com by two days. McDonald coined Enronitis to describe the stock market’s reaction to Enron’s fall.

Dubious accounting practices have been dubbed Enronomics, a term coined by Eric Scigliano in Seattle Weekly on 3 January: “Kenneth Lay, huddled with Vice President Cheney to draft a national energy policy based on the same Enronomics as its own disastrous business strategy.” And those who practice Enronomics have been dubbed Enronistas, by the Richmond Times-Dispatch (17 January).

Jim Sullivan of The Boston Globe describes the failure of Tina Brown’s Talk magazine as Enronish (22 January).

Then of course, there are the puns. Unsurprisingly, leading the way was the tabloid New York Post, which on 1 December 2001 ran a headline, “The Enron-Around.”

Cheryl Glaser of Minnesota Public Radio describes close relationships between corporations and the government as Enronic (30 January). Glaser is following in the footsteps of Paul Solman of the Newshour with Jim Lehrer who suggests take the money and Enron (25 January). And obviously someone who illegally cuts corners is making an End-ron. This last is courtesy Paul Zielbauer of the New York Times on 3 February.

But what about the name that started it all? Where does the name Enron come from? The name was coined in 1986 for the new corporation formed by the merger of Houston Natural Gas and the Omaha, Nebraska-based InterNorth. Enron was chosen over the other option of Interron.

How Many Words in the English Language?

15 February 2001

This question is only tangentially related to word and phrase origins, but enough people ask it that I thought I’d provide a permanent answer.

This is an indeterminate question. First, there is the problem of what exactly is a word. Are mouse, mice, mousy, and mouselike separate words or just forms of one root word? Is a computer mouse the same word as the rodent? (To demonstrate the difficulty in counting words, over the centuries many scholars have attempted to count how many different words Shakespeare used in his corpus of work. The counts run anywhere from 16,000 to 30,000.)

Second, unlike French, English has no official body to determine what is proper and what is not. English dictionaries are (usually) descriptive in nature, not prescriptive. That is they describe how the language exists and is used, they do not prescribe its use. Just because a word “is not in the dictionary,” doesn’t mean that it is not a legitimate word. It simply means the dictionary editors omitted it for one reason or another.

The Oxford English Dictionary, the largest English-language dictionary, contains some 290,000 entries with some 616,500 word forms in its second edition. Of course, there are lots of slang and regional words that are not included and the big dictionary omits many proper names, scientific and technical terms, and jargon as a matter of editorial policy (e.g., there are some 1.4 million named species of insect alone). All told, estimates of the total vocabulary of English start at around three million words and go up from there.

Of these, about 200,000 words are in common use today. An educated person has a vocabulary of about 20,000 words and uses about 2,000 in a week’s conversation. (These estimates vary widely depending on who is doing the counting, so don’t take them as absolute.)