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Great vowel shift prove8/11/2023 But we still use a doubled letter in the inflected form "winning" to represent that the vowel is / ɪ/ and not / aɪ/. The endings eroded in the modern word, which is now just "win" in the infinitive. A geographic examination of Survey of English Dialects data provides evidence in favor of a push-chain analysis of the Great Vowel Shift, in which the Middle English high-mid long vowels raised before the high long vowels were diphthongized. The word "win" comes from Middle English "winnen", where the vowel was short. Vowels were not lengthened when they were followed by a double consonant. The Great Vowel Shift is the name given to a series of changes of long vowels between the 14th and the 18th c. This convention continues to be used in modern times, even though the "long" and "short" vowels have changed their sounds. Early NE witnessed the greatest event in the history of English vowels the Great Vowel Shift, which involved the change of all ME long monophthongs, and probably some of the diphthongs. "Wine" is one such word it comes from Old English "wīn", but it ended up being spelled "wine" to represent the long vowel. So spelling words with a single consonant followed by an e at the end came to be seen as representing a long vowel, and ended up being used for many words that didn't ever end in a schwa. Later on, the schwa sound at the end of words became lost, but the vowel in the previous syllable stayed long. So a word spelled with a vowel, a single consonant letter, and a final -e would always have a long vowel. In Middle English, there was a rule that a vowel in a syllable not ending in a consonant was lengthened. So a word like "care", which developed from Old English "caru", would have been two syllables: / kaː.rə/. Phonetics TheGreatVowelShift(GVS) The real facts about the Great Vowel Shift are verycomplex. Lower line is lax vowels, the solid is the others. In fact, the spelling system of Early Middle English represented the pronunciation fairly well, with few "silent" letters. the average vowel duraiton in frcative environments the small unlled circle is for stop environments. (We know this e was at one point pronounced and not silent based on things like metrical evidence from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales). So why do we represent long vowels with an e at the end of the word? Well, early Middle English had a schwa sound /ə/ at the end of some words, which was spelled with an "e". The change a distinction in vowel length to one of vowel quantity and diphthongs is referred to as the "Great Vowel Shift" and there's a nice summary on Wikipedia. As Egmont described, the vowels / ɪ/ and / aɪ/ are historically related in that the first developed from Middle English short /i/ and the second from a long one.
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