If you’ve ever wondered why ‘though’ and ‘cough’ are spelled the same but pronounced completely differently, you’re not alone. Why does English spelling have so many quirks/really effing stupid things that are hard to remember? The answer lies in a dramatic event that happened a few hundred years ago: the Great Vowel Shift. Yes, that’s a thing. A vowel shift. Because English, at some point, decided it was too easy.
What even is a Great Vowel Shift?
A vowel
The Great Vowel Shift was a major linguistic event that took place in English between the 15th and 18th centuries. And it dramatically altered the way we pronounced long vowels. What the hell’s a long vowel, I hear you ask? The opposite of a short vowel, obvs. Sorry. A long vowel is one that’s pronounced the same way as the letter’s name in the alphabet, like ‘a’ in ‘cake’ or ‘i’ in ‘bike’. A short vowel has a more clipped sound, like the ‘a’ in ‘cat’ or the ‘e’ in ‘bed’.
It doesn’t seem like much of a distinction, I know. And that’s because of the Great Vowel Shift. Before it, in Middle English we held long vowels for longer when we spoke. For example, we pronounced the word ‘bite’ with a long ‘i’, like ‘beet’. But then some bright sparks started shifting vowels upwards in their mouths. This is called ‘raising’ in linguistics. It happens when the tongue is positioned higher in the mouth during the pronunciation of a vowel.
The problem is that no one bothered to tell our spelling about this. So the way many of our words are spelled today reflects how they used to sound before the Shift. That’s why words like ‘cough’ and ‘through’ look like they should rhyme but sound like they come from completely different universes.
If you think things are bad now, imagine what it was like for anyone trying to speak and spell English in the 1500s. One day ‘boot’ rhymes with ‘foot’, then the next it doesn’t any more. WHAT. THE. FUCK.
But why though?
The extremely informative answer is that no one really knows. Theories range from the influence of French after the Norman Conquest (thanks a lot, France) to social mobility and dialect mixing, particularly after the Black Death and the War of the Roses. Or it might just have been down to people wanting to sound fancier (like saying ‘myself’ when you mean ‘me’ today, GRRRR). Whatever happened, it’s like English made a bet with itself on how hard it could make things for future generations. Spoiler: it won.
The good news is that next time you hear someone complain about English spelling, you can smugly and knowledgably say ‘Well actually, that’s down to the Great Vowel Shift’. You’re welcome.