What Was the Great Vowel Shift? 

Seriously? Linguists went with "shift" when the Great Vowel Movement was sitting right there?

Rhyming evidence is astonishing to me, because when I was in school, and we would ask the English teacher why some of Shakespeare’s rhymes just didn’t work, she not only didn’t know the answer, but she didn’t know there was an answer. She just called it a “near rhyme” and told us that was acceptable in Shakespearean poetry.

It is quite amusing how many dont realize that speaking without accent is like writing without font.

As an Italian speaker the variety and 'confusion', as it were, of English vowels has always been a fascinating source of amusement and desperation.

"The relationship between sounds are socially conditioned". I like this statement a lot. I noticed that when language learners try to fit the sounds in the new language to the closest sounds in their native phonology system, they perceive the distance of sounds differently. When Chinese (mandarin) learn English and speak with an accent, we approximate the English letter "C" /si/ as /ɕi/ or /sei/ (depending on regions). Also the English word "she" /ʃi/ as /ʂi/. However, when English reporters pronounce 习 /ɕi/ (the family name of the president of China), they tend to say "she" /ʃi/ but never /si/. So, according to native Chinese speakers, /ʃi/ is close to /ʂi/, and /si/ is close to /ɕi/ (in certain regions of China). But native English speakers think /ɕi/ is close to /ʃi/.

I think one of the most fascinating aspects of your videos is when you demonstrate old pronunciations. As a Swede, it's fun being able to recognize how closely related English is. There's just a diphthong or slight variation in the way! Oftentimes, an old pronunciation is still used in modern Swedish. For example, my ears perked up when you said 'blood', as if I was suddenly listening to a Swedish speaker. It felt like my ears changed lenses - from English to Swedish.

As an experiment, I'd love it if you could invent your own vowel shift, either completely imaginary or based on where you think vowels are going to be in the future and produce a video reading something in this imagined accent!

Wonderful series and this entry is an especial gem. Found a 16th century rhyme which I'd never noticed before - It's Clifford in Henry VI part 2: "To France, to France, and get what you have LOST/Spare England, for it is your native COAST." Not a very typical Shakespeare rhyme so I wonder if this is his attempt to capture Clifford's Cumbrian accent. I'm playing the guy at the moment and treating both like the vowel in a modern RP "force".

This makes a lot of sense. I've been casually learning Russian and it has forced me to confront the way I use vowels (need to be deliberate about it instead of haphazard) in order to be able to sneak 'ы' in there and deal with all the yods.

One of my favourite little vowel shifts is the celery-salary merger, where 'e' and 'a' before 'l' in those words have merged to the 'a' in cat. This is happenening in Australian English, but only in southern Victoria where I'm from. One of the interesting things about this is that Australia doesn't really have much regional variation in accents which makes it far more noticeable when changes like this occur

As someone with a speech impediment, the way people perceive how other people talk was interesting. In my experience as a child, people can be both brutal and lazy. Brutally rude and lazy at listening. As an adult, I still struggle to be understood when I am tired. Indeed, at such times, I have even been falsely accused of being drunk.

I really appreciate how you emphasise that there's no 'neutral' English accent and that yours is just as 'non-standard' as mine (West of Scotland) is. Having puzzled my way through many "this word sounds like" tables it's refreshing to not be a weirdo freak who speaks 'wrong' :)

23:36 Seeing those goslings move reminds me that birds are, just indeed, dinosaurs.

Great video! I especially enjoyed your point about people registering different sounds as the same sound but in different accents. It really is quite interesting how we’re able to subconsciously swap out vowels whilst conversing with someone with a different accent!

my granny born in 1930s Ireland had preserved the distinction between meet/meat

Your nature backgrounds are an incredibly classy choice that seems secondary at first to your main topic but which I think makes absorption of the information much easier.

Chain shifts to distinguish otherwise similar words explained something funny about my Bajan (Barbadian) dialect. The word "cannot" or "can't" becomes something like /k:æⁿ/, so "can" becomes something like /kə/ depending on the speaker's region or generation, and perhaps a merger with the word "could". People alternate between dialect and more standard English throughout the day, so they can hear the polar meaning of the "cannot" that sounds like "can" to someone unfamiliar with our accent. (Apologies for any confusion caused by incorrect IPA. It's a process.)

Those goslings at the end really do look like little dinosaurs don't they

here’s an example of how our perceptions of accent are related to the accent that we have. I have the cot-caught merger (I actually have to type that into my phone because my phone just writes “cot cot” when I speak it.) and I did not know that was a thing until I started watching your channel and others a few years ago. In my mind no vowel could be pronounced with a rounded mouth position except for the O or the OO. anybody who pronounced the letter A with a rounded mouth was putting on a posh accent. I didn’t believe it was a natural way for anyone to make that vowel.

I was talking with someone earlier about my having [ɤ̞] in place of the /ɜː/ vowel. It's interesting that our brains can automatically handle a lot of different accents, even if isolating the sound would make it seem weird.

Re the pronunciation of English short 'a' (e.g. in 'man'), I remember years ago having some involvement in a German primary-school English project, and the kids were taught explicitly to pronounce it exactly like the German letter 'ä', representing the short vowel /ɛ/ (not the long one in 'Käse', which has two variants, as Simon modelled). What's more, they were actually reprimanded for substituting German /a/ (as in 'Mann'), which they did instinctively because of the spelling ... but also because of the Yorkshireman in the room reinforcing what the teacher obviously considered a very bad habit! Fortunately for her fashions have since shifted in her favour, as the British model has largely been superseded by the American ...

Finally, a video about this sound shift

I am amazed by your ability to hear and pronounce all these vowels. My first language has only 5 main vowels like Latin.

Thanks for pointing out how our own natural dialect feels more 'neutral'. That may quite possibly be the hardest sticking point to overcome when attempting to create a spelling reform that works across dialects.

Excellent video as usual. The section at the end about how the simple fact that we don't use these sounds anymore is what makes them seem so strangely novel was very well explained.

Rhyme evidence: "The hooly blisful martir for to seke / That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke." In modern English, at least in dialects I'm aware of, "seek" and "sick" don't sound the same. To Chaucer, they did. This also shows that the replacement of "hem" with "them" was in progress.

Earlier today I was trying to understand this east Tennessee shift that's like Star --> Store --> Stower --> Stohrrr and I don't understand any of this stuff formally. Thank you for helping me feel like it might eventually make sense.

I appreciate your videos with graphics interspersed with local footage. Very informative and very chill; thank you for sharing

1350's accent sounds exactly like me when I speak English but keep the (Québecois) French pronunciation for all words, as if I read them literally, unaware of it being a different language at all.

Everyone loves A Great Vowel Movement!

Being around to hear English English turn into approximately US English is fantastic. What a time to be alive.

Nicely done and informative. I appreciate the graphics. And I like your technique of changing the garden scene each time the topic or concept changes.

As always, very well thought out and articulated. I enjoy your channel so much, and I love the garden shots as you explain the concepts!

Watched your GVS videos when I had to write an essay about it for uni last term… super helpful and interesting, thank you for your content!

yet another great explanation! this video really helped me understand the sound differences in a much more intuitive way. thanks, simon!

Fascinating. Thank you. Watching Your videos is great compensation for difficulties in learning English.

thank you for making a video on this! i have to study it for my A levels but it doesn't feeling like boring studying when you explain it because i watch your videos in my free time!

Great video as always Simon

Related to this, I've heard a lot of hype about a similar vowel shift occurring today in Inland Northern American English/The Upper Midwest. Probably most well known as the "Chicago" accent. It's quite drastic and I feel it might surprise a lot of non-American viewers!

Thank you, Simon. Nicely explained. And demonstrated.

Lol, that makes so much sense When in Polish ó was pronounced as ɔː long time ago, later as ʊ, and now as u In Czech ý used to be ɪː, then changed to iː and modern speakers of Bohemia pronounce it as ɛj Russian а is(and was) technically a, but is pronounced a bit like ɔ, when on weak possition in word All of those are higher in mouth

What you say at 23:13 about how your accent would be perceived differently by different English speakers across time and space is fascinating to me. It would be very interesting for native speakers across the Anglosphere to record themselves speaking and exchange the recordings with each other, and then try to glean (or guess) as much information about the speaker as they could. I wonder how much they would get right and how off-base they would be.

you should make a video about the origins of the phonology of multicultural london english

I have noticed that when you do older accents, there's pitch difference from your regular pitch to the point that your voice sounds completely different. I know it's a stupid question but how much of it is due to an artistic choice and/or the difference between vowel quality? As in if pitch played a role in older accents of English and not necessarily the social association with certain accents as you discussed at the end. Loved the video as always!

always appreciate your videos thank you

Modern Southern American English, West-central Florida: Ah feel uh blisstr on mah fayse. chahld, gown-thuh haoowz-n-git thuh goozez maeet. (I feel a blister on my face. Child, go in the house and get the gooses meat) Keep in mind, this is me analyzing my own pronunciation based on what I could make out of what the closing statement was, and I also do not have any teeth.

And in Canada and the northeastern US, by now the PRICE and MOUTH vowel sets have split as well thanks to another raising shift

Love the Cumbrian accent clip - the accents of the north of England have sadly been lost as they were perceived to reflect lower social class and lower intellect…

My dialect allows for vowels that are pretty close to the early stages of the vowel shift. I avoid some of these pronunciations when I'm speaking formally (where my speech becomes closer to General American), but these are all possible realizations in my US/Canada border region dialect: price [pɹəis], fleece [fliːs], face [feːs], mouth [məʊθ], goose [ɡʉːs], goat [ɡoːt]

Vowel shift enters the chat Most of North England: leaves chat

Thanks so much for doing this video. I've always kind of scratched my head over how the 'face' vowel was able to move up so far, but this explained it. You make have already discussed it elsewhere, but I would love to hear you speak to how some 'double-o' words like 'foot', 'blood' broke away (in pronunciation) from the basic 'goose' vowel.

also, its a pet peeve of mine when people who learned English as an alternate language, decide to try and virtue signal by criticizing native Noth American English speakers for using the wrong pronunciations for words. this dude was mad about "guerilla" and "gorilla" being pronounced as "g'rilla". so he figured he would tell this guy that he was pronouncing "guerilla" wrong and sounded like he was talking about gorillas. 🤨

Thank you, Simon! 🎉🎉

Its interesting how a language variety is still understandable after 1 or 2 vowel chain shifts. I have an axe to grind with people who bring out a single latgaliešu words like "deiga" and when people in Rīga cant recognise it as it sounds like dega to them assert that latgaliešu language is a different language, because if you actually take full sentences or even paragraphs their speech is perfectly recognisable to anyone who knows the literary latviešu language or is a master of any dialect really 1) rēzekniešu folksong (if memory does not fail me, I last sung it in university) 1) same song in the literary language 1) Sēju rūtu sēju mātru sēju lilejeiti; sēju munu jaunu dīnu kai zaļā rūteņa. 1) Sēju rūtu sēju mētru sēju lilejeiti; sēju manu jaunu dienu kā zaļo rūteni 2) Deiga rūta deiga mātra deiga lilejeite; deiga muna jauna dīna kai zaļā rūteņa. 2) Dīga rūta dīga mētra dīga lilejeite; dīga mana jauna diena kā zaļā rūtaine. ... You can clearly see the regular sound corespondances makings these too language varieties perfectly inteligable in context.

Thank you for this. It explains why my German colleague used to say 'bleck' for black. (I am from the East Midlands)

I always love the footage of birds you have in the background by the way. My two interests together - birds and language

Brilliant video, thank you! I learnt a lot.

RU-vidr "Parrot175" is a perfect example of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift in modern American English. He pronounces the word bag as "bayg" (as in bagel without the -el).

Wonderful summary at the end that accents and dialects are mechanical, not tied to status.

Fascinating as ever! 🤠💜

Good heavens, I met Roger Lass and had fascinating chats with him here in Cape Town. I never realized… Thanks for a great video. I realize my accent is stuck in 60´s rp with South African influence.

Being from Antwerp, I think the "ea" and oa" sounds were actually pronounced as e(y)a and o(y)a. We have a lot of sounds like that. A goat in official Dutch is geit (pronounced as "ge(y)it"), but in Antwerp we say "ga(y)at" like in might or night. When someone would actually say the word "go(y)at", we would interpret it as a geit, pronounced in very "plat (=flat) Aantwaarps". Meat was probablty pronounced as "mè(y)at", shifting over "mé(y)at" and "mi(y)at" to "mi_t". - The word blood, (with a long vowel, unlike the short one in English, wich sounds like "blot") is just how we pronounce it here, with an oo sound like in eau (french water, or waterloo lol), although in official Dutch it is bloed, wich sounds exactly the same as the German Blut.

Amazing, informative and entertaining video as always. Loved the gosling footage - where did you film them?

Is there a list of words that linguists normally use as examples for English vowel phonemes? I notice that a few seem to be standardized, such as that the "fleece" vowel is never called the "seed" vowel or the "deep" vowel, and the "kit" vowel is never called the "sip" vowel or the "rig" vowel, but English's vowel inventory has over a dozen phonemes and I haven't caught a dozen standard example words yet.

Great video!

What if we use umlauts and circumflexes to mark when it used to be one vowel but is now another? Umlauts for front vowels, circumflexes for back vowels, for example: originally /a/ but now /e/ = ä, originally /e/ but now /i/ = ë, originally /a/ but now /o/ = â, originally /o/ but now /u/ = ô, and maybe the back accent to represent dropping: originally /u/ but now /o/ = ù, and so on. This way we could continue spelling many words the same way, but we’re now noting that hey a doesn’t actually make the sound ei and so on

I've learned a lot here because i thought it was the Great Bowel Shift..

We still hear elements of various stages of the vowel shift in various regionals accents and dialects. To me it is more like a process of drawl, where e.g. leek, becomes leik, becomes, becomes modern diphthong 'ai' in 'like' (using modern English spellings). I still hear down here fortneet or fortneit (fortnight), or tea as 'tay' or head as 'aid as examples. The vowel shift is still going on upcountry in some areas like Birmingham and London, were 'like' sounds like 'loik' etc, and in London van sounds like 'vain'.

I've witnesses a lesser vowel shift in my lifetime. When I took the course "Stochastic Processes" at university in the 1990's, nobody thought of pronouncing a long "e" just before the final "s" of "Processes," but now I hear it all the time. I hear the same with "biases." I cringe when I hear them, but language evolves.

Whoa, the Closed Captions actually understood that guy from Cumberland far more than I ever could. Schoolmaster = "scalemuster?"

Good video, thank you 🙏

Thanks for turning me on to Dr. Geoff Lindsey. (The "There Is No Spoon" kid from The Matrix really grew up fast!)

very beautiful shirts, Simon!

Hi! This was a very helpful video, I understood a lot about the great viwel ahift. Just one curiosity, where do schwa sounds come into play? Is it up or down?

I like how you include Cumbrian dialects in your videos

Thank you for adding this context to understanding the shift, not just how the sounds changed but in unison with each other, and in somewhat predictable patterns that are still happening today. I found the particular part about New Zealands 'kit' sound ending sort of as 'ket' in the middle very interesting too, isn't that similar as what happens in South African English? Also, I have a few questions that I'm interested in: Firstly: in a lot of comparisons with European languages you have, over the years, often used German examples. Being Dutch, I find that on quite some occasions the Dutch example would have matched the description possibly more closely (though this isn't my profession so this can be dismissed, as a native speaker it just feels this way). Do you have some experience with Dutch? I know that you have used Dutch examples sometimes, but more commonly German ones. Or, perhaps do you use German because it's often a little further apart and therefore easier to make a point? Or possibly it really is a closer match when talking about older English compared to modern? Secondly: I'd be interested in the challenges in pronunciation that the letter y presents, in relation to different accents. I noticed (and I hope that's okay with you) that when you said the word 'use' in the second half of your video, it perhaps sounded a little more like 'yeese' than 'yuuse' (I am not familiar enough with the symbolic writing so I don't dare try that lest it's wrong). I also had an English colleague who pronounced the word year as 'yur'. Are these things related? I feel that the y-sound followed by vowels could be interesting?

amazing, and nice batik

2:46 How does he do that?! This man is so skilled.

A very good talk! When did the long back quality in "plant" develop? Was it a French influence? And was "LAW" ever pronounced with the /au/ diphthong?

Great video as always. Something I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on is the variation of length in vowels in different phonological environments, particularly in reference to their RP symbology. I find that in my own speech (not far off your own), /æ/ for example has a similar length distribution to /iː/, while some vowels are always short and others always long (choosing not to narrowly transcribe diphthongs here): bat bad [baʔ baːd] beat bead [biʔ biːd] butt bud [bʌʔ bʌd] bart bard [bɑːʔ bɑːd]

Intresting about many Germans pronouncing 'cat' with that æ sound as the phonetic spelling would dictate. I think this is how it sounds in South African English as well. I recently watched a RU-vidr and I couldn't exactly make out where he was from and asked him if his accent was a mix of German and South African, and he said, no, just South African lol. Anyway, this was interesting!

You would find a trip to rural areas along the Maryland/Virginia Eastern Shore of the U.S. fascinating for the pronunciations you would hear.

I've always wandered, what about the future. Does this Vowel Shift continue now and what English may sound like hundreds years in the future? Are there any researches?

Re 12:45 - Just would like to note that the NZ vowel shift doesn’t apply to all front vowels - it’s confined to the short vowels only.

It's interesting listening to this as a very badly dyslexic person. I can't easily process phonological sounds and definitely can't relate the phonological sound to how it might be spelt. In the case of people like me who are a Venn diagram of history nerd and very badly dyslexic, understanding the history of how English changed might be helpful.

Oh this a big deal, excited to watch this

Sion, could you explain how Old/Middle French ei/ey became oi/oy and then was / wehN ? This happened after the Norman English period, some sometime after Caucer and into the modern period.

As a Portuguese speaker, I am one of those people that try to rhyme eat and kit. On the other hand, I find it quite amusing when people from the US can't tell the difference between e, é, ê, éi, and êi, as they are vastly different to me. Anyways, you eventually get used to people calling you "Peidro"

Isle of Tenerife, Spain, Africa. Well done, Richard! How well are you acquainted with your Gaelic equivalent, An Loingseach? Hey, I intend to start learning Frisian next week. Do you fancy joining me in the adventure? It will greatly help our understanding of Old English, don't you think? Best wishes, Patchy.

21:10 I wonder how much the linguistical changes were influenced by people's hearing health? If you think about it, even today, when peope are comminicating, the thing that most people naturally do when you're trying to communicate, if the other person cant hear you, is to shift your vowels around. 'Why Hello there'. 'Wye Halloo tharr'. 'Wee Haylow Tayhr'. ...etc... So, to surmise, maybe it wasn't our speech that was shifting after all, but our hearing changed as people moved to live in populations with different levels of ambient noise in the background?

Excellent video! I’ve found an explanation of the GVS on Quora, which sounds absolutely fascinating if it’s true, but which I don’t understand! I have copied and pasted it below. Do you think there’s anything in this? “Absurd as it might sound, the English Great Vowel Shift is the inevitable result of a seemingly unrelated linguistic change happening two millennia earlier. Proto-Germanic developed out of the Pre-Proto-Germanic Indo-European language in the mid first millennium BCE. The three defining changes, in the order they occurred, was Grimm’s law, Verner’s law and the shift in word accent from a moveable pitch accent to a stress accent fixed on the first syllable. The last of these is the culprit in this long story. At first, Proto-Germanic retained the Proto-Indo-European vowel system with phonemically contrasting long and short vowels. Whereas this had worked well in conjunction with the earlier pitch accent, the new stress accent combined somewhat uneasily with it. In a way it doubled the vowel inventory, creating four variants of each vowel quality: long stressed, short stressed, long unstressed and short unstressed. Each of the descendant languages of Proto-Germanic have at glacial speeds resolved this in similar but not identical ways, indicating that it is an inherent tendency and not cross-branch loans of features. In the earliest phase, unstressed vowels were reduced and stressed ones diversified. The reduction of unstressed vowels was a combination of loss (primarily of originally short vowels), shortening of long vowels and conflation of vowel qualities (which were still distinguished in stressed syllables). While this resulted in fewer possible vowel phonemes in unstressed syllables, the number of options for stressed syllabled conversely increased as variant vowel qualities were introduced by assimilation to the unstressed vowels prior to their reduction, and phonemised if those were lost or conflated with a different vowel. Throughout this period, vowel length remains a phonemic distinction in stressed syllables. However, vowel length is not the only component of syllable length. Long (double) consonants or consonant sequences following the vowel also makes a syllable long; and in combination with a long vowel or a diphtong, the syllable becomes “overlong”. This variation ultimately made it too cumbersome to maintain a pure length distinction in stressed syllables also, resulting in the quality of long and short vowels starting to diverge already towards the end of the phase described above. But with the increased number of vowel qualities resulting from the assimilations described above, a further doubling was not feasible. English, Icelandic and Faroese all changed some previously long vowels into diphtongs, and changed the quality of others. Norwegian and Swedish took a somewhat different approach, and adjusted the quality some long and some short vowels so that few of the original pairs today match up, but trending towards a situation where originally “neighbouring” qualities form new matching pairs. At the same time, short vowels not followed by long consonants or consonant sequences were lengthened, so that stressed syllables are always long. Originally long vowels followed by long consonants or consonant sequences were shortened to avoid overlong syllables. As diphtongs are difficult to shorten, another consequence of this is the monophtongisation of diphtongs in eastern Old Norse, which is yet only partially carried out in Norwegian.” I’ve also often wondered when people first realised that the shift had happened. I know Jespersen was the first to describe it, but was he the first to discover it? (Thomas Moore apparently thought she also didn’t know how to rhyme so apparently he didn’t realise that the pronunciation of language can change.)

Are there terms to reflect the relationship between "a vowel sound" (which remains fixed) and "the vowel used in a given word" (which moves)? (Similar to how we say that a "sign" is the relation between "signifier" vs "signified"?)

The strangest memory I have from primary school in the 1980's was an odd teacher who stopped the entire assembley (we used to sing songs in assembley in the mornings) when we were singing 'she'll be coming round the mountain when she comes'. He was quite annoyed at us all and said "she isn't coming round a mounTIN, she's coming round a mounTAIN", he then made us all sing it with emphasis on the TAIN (so pronouncing it mountayn) it's a rather odd memory of a very peculiar teacher. I'm still sure that us kids were pronouncing it properly.

Great video! People tend to not see or be able to reproduce the difference between two similar sounds when this difference doesn't exist in their own language. I, per example, speak Portuguese, and while I was studying English, I couldn't distinguish "man" /mæn/ from "men" /mɛn/ or "beach" /bijtʃ/ from "bitch" /bɪtʃ/ (luckily mine always sounded like "beach", not the other one) or even "mall" /mɑl/ from "mol" /mɔl/ because these distinctions don't exist in Portuguese. I used to pronounce both as /mɛn/, /bijtʃ/ and /mɔl/ (/mɔw/ actually). And the same works the other way around. Portuguese makes a very important distinction between é /ɛ/ and ê /e/, and ó /ɔ/ and ô /o/, English doesn't. So English Portuguese learners often can't either hear or speak the difference between "posso" /'pɔ.su/ (I can) and "poço" /'po.su/ (water well) neither the difference between "desce" /'dɛ.si/ (it descends) and "desse" /'de.si/ (of this one). It gets worse when it's a recurring thing that 2 different words are only distinguished by pronunciation and context alone, per example: "o começo" /u ko'me.su/ (the beginning) and "eu começo" /ew ko'mɛ.su/ (I begin); and "o porco" /u 'por.ku/ (the pig) and "os porcos" /us 'pɔr.kus/ (the pigs). None of these examples rhyme. And it and it gets even worse when you add to the balance all the nasal vowels and diphthongs.

Thanks, Simon! Enlightening video! My native language (Ukrainian) has only 6 vowel phonemes: /i ɛ a ɔ u ɨ*/ and English vowels has been a big challenge for me. *It's described as /ɪ/ in "Ukrainian phonology" in Wikipedia, but the way the letter "И" is usually pronounced in Ukrainian, at least in my accent, sounds closer to [ɨ] than to [ɪ].

I love the feel of using Berserkers but would especially like to see how they can be used maximally in a smart campaign context. Are they a good choice in certain army compositions when they could actually make an impact on campaign victory?

I finally have some kind of explanation why you say "Tea" but not "Bear" pronounced like "Beer". I made the mistake in English class at school (I am from Germany) because I thought when you say "Tea" the EA combination in "Bear" must be pronounced like "Beer". Well. The title of the story I was supposed to read out loud turned into "The fox and the beer" and caused some laughter. Unfortunately my teacher just said I made a mistake and corrected me but never explained me why it's pronounced different.

Any chance of a transsciption of what the old dialect at 24:10 is saying? 2nd sentence is something about a schoolmaster, I think, but the first bit might as well be gibberish to me.

question: Early middle english wrote long u as "ou" and short u as "u" (yes, it was secondarily lengthened in open syllables), what was the way to write long i?

One thing that really intrests me in different verities of English is the "Intrusive R" which exists in many dialects to varying degrees, but I find most noticeable in Australian English where a word like /ˌheˈlo͡ʊ/ is pronounced like /ˌheˈlɑɹ/ (: