The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

by Melvyn Bragg

The Tamperers were attempting in their way to bring reason to bear on the development of the language. English has never been very partial to reason and as if to prove it, at the same time as the “b”s and the silent “l”s and “h”s were being smuggled into perfectly sound words, the Great Vowel Shift occurred which resulted in many of the English pronouncing most things differently anyway. When properly read aloud, the fourteenth-century English of Chaucer sounds strange to modern ears in a way that, on the whole, the late sixteenth-century English of Shakespeare does not. For example, Chaucer’s way of saying “name” would have rhymed with the modern “calm,” his “fine” with our “seen”; he would have pronounced “meet” more or less as we would pronounce “mate,” “do” as “doe,” and “cow” as “coo” (as it is still pronounced in parts of Scotland).