This ruined English spelling

*elusive

We should call it "The irritable vowel shift" then.

Basically, English standardized its spelling at exactly the wrong moment.

I study linguistics at a university in Belarus. Today I had an exam in the history of English language and got a question related to your video. Thanks to you, I was able to write it well :)

As a German, at minute 13:29 where you pulled out the words "Knight" and "Gnome", I tried to apply the "original" "gh" sound on knight, but also pronouncing the k, it instantly sounded like the German "Knecht".

“Look” and “spook” and “book” do all rhyme for me. (cries in Scottish)

English is a difficult language. It can be understood through tough thorough thought though….

Very interesting! As a Dutch person learning to speak English it was very strange to see same spelling being pronounced very differently. The funny thing is that if I would pronounce the English words in a Dutch way (reading the words as if they were Dutch words), these words, I now find, sounded a lot like the original words. Keep on doing this good work, Rob!

Thank you Rob! I’m an ESL teacher, and these videos have helped me explain some of our strange English pronunciation and spelling to my students 😊

This is BY FAR the easiest and most comprehensible explanation of the Great Vowel Shift i've ever seen. Every linguist will overcomplicate it by assuming you can fluently read the IPA and know exactly what are the various classifications of consonants and what's the exact difference between similar vowel sounds, so it always ends up sounding like an advanced algebra lesson instead of a quick 15 minute explaination.

When I saw the video title, I shook an imaginary fist and blamed the French first and foremost.

Oh, you did it! I asked you to do the great vowel shift in a comment on one of your previous videos. I told you I’d rather learn it from you than anyone. And now you have. Quite an undertaking to explain all that. Thank you so much.

I wondered most of my life why Australian english seemed to have lost so many of the distinctive nuances of the variety of dialects from all over Britain, that walked off the first ships onto Australian shores. We kept, and still use, so many phrases, words, slang etc but the accent is flatter and more homogenous. The best explaination I've read is that convicts and settlers had to conciously pull their regional accents down to a level all could comprehend. I think we had our own vowel shift! Excellent article as usual Rob.

Looking at the three main western germanic languages, English went through its great vowel shift; High German underwent its consonant shift; Dutch basically ignored these changes. That's why you find quite a few cognates where the Dutch word has roughly the same consonants as English, and roughly the same vowels as German - appel/apple/Apfel straat/street/Straße.

11:13 - The acknowledgment that Rob just punned should have been more elaborate. It was so subtle that it almost went over my head.

Can’t believe i just realised those words with the “gh” at the end…? The Dutch words for “laugh, sight, cough, enough and rough” are “lach, zicht, kuch, genoeg and ruig”, all with that choking gg sound. Same with some German words like durch (through). Frisian is also surprisingly similar to English… Oh and you have one new subscriber 😊

West Pennsylvania: Creek is crick; roots are ruts; roof is ruff; route is rute. Say, "I like things lie gat (like that)." Many more. There is a bit of PA Dutch around, and a sweep of Appalachia but can't say if that is the influence in the dialect I've just mentioned.

0:52 - In my home town there was once a professor who, unlike Otto Jespersen here, DID always refer to "The Great Vowel Shift" as "The Great Vowel Movement". The students in his class were always biting their pencils to avoid breaking out in cackling.

"Until we mate again" signoff. Ouch.

Hi Rob, I’m very much a fan of yours & I love your videos. As an amateur linguist for the past 50 years, I absolutely loved this video. It took me decades to distill all the information you’ve brought together in this production & you should be very proud of the quality of your work. And the cherry on the cake? In my humble opinion, this is the slickest video you have produced (and I have watched them all!). Cheers! Dennis