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language caused it to evolve very rapidly from its old synthetic,
inflected form into the analytic language that we know today.

The influx of French words after the loss of Normandy in 1204
radically enriched the vocabulary of English, making it nearly as

much a Romance language (that is, descended eventually from
Latin) as it was a Germanic one. Much of the historical change

in English was accomplished by the thirteenth century: Middle

English grammar is very close to Modern English grammar. But
why is Chaucer’s Middle English different from Modern

English in any way at all?

England was never again conquered, so there was no
cataclysm to cause any kind of massive change in English. And

yet anyone who listens to Chaucer knows that there is a bigger
difference between him and Shakespeare in language than there

is between Shakespeare and us. Yet Shakespeare and Chaucer
were closer to each other in time by far than Shakespeare is to

us. What happened? A slightly oversimplified answer is The

Great Vowel Shift. In a relatively short time toward the
beginning of the sixteenth century, the pronunciation of many

English vowels changed. This was the most thoroughgoing
phonetic change in English since it separated from Proto-

Germanic. Although the Great Vowel Shift did not really change
the spelling of words, it changed the way almost all of them

were pronounced. We will examine this shift in some detail

because it explains so much, from rhymes in Chaucer to word-
play in Shakespeare to why the English spelling system seems to

be so bizarre.

The Great Vowel Shift was the most momentous linguistic
change since the Norman Conquest.

1 The Great Vowel Shift Itself

The simplest description of the Great Vowel Shift is that

the seven tense or, more commonly, long vowels of Middle

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