Change: the short and the long of the “e” in “the”—and the Great Vowel Shift
The Anchoress wants to know the answer to a burning question of great import:
Growing up, I was taught that when you are following the word T-H-E with a word that begins with a vowel, then the correct (and, to my ear) more pleasant pronunciation was “thee” – long e…I notice an increasing trend the other way, though…It grates on my ears…Am I too fussy? What do you say? When it precedes a word beginning in a vowel, do you go with “thee” or “thuh?”
Being somewhat of a grammar fussbudget myself (although you may have observed that as soon as a person makes such an assertion, it’s almost inevitably followed by the commission of some glaring grammatical error), I have to say that of course I go with “thee.”
I must admit that I’d not noted the creeping ascension of the “thuh” crowd before—although, now that The Anchoress has pointed it out, the trend hardly surprises me. There have been many changes of this nature taking over lately. I wrote at some length about one of them—the widespread confusion between “it’s” and “its”—here.
Now I know that language and its conventions are an ever-shifting work in progress; try reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the original if you don’t agree. But when the older versions just sound better to the ear (such as the “thee” of which The Anchoress speaks), or make a certain amount of sense (such as “it’s” as a contraction for “it is,” to distinguish it from the possessive “its” which resembles “his” and “hers”), it’s difficult to accept that the change is anything but for the worse. Not that the next generation cares what I think, or what I accept.
Speaking of change (and Canterbury Tales), did people feel the same about all of this around Chaucer’s day? I ask the question because any current transformation of the pronunciation of “the” is small potatoes (very small potatoes indeed) compared to such upheavals as the Great Vowel Shift that occurred after Chaucer’s time:
Chaucer’s generation of English-speakers was among the last to pronounce e at the end of words (so for Chaucer the word “care” was pronounced [kaËrÉ™], not as the [kÉ›(r)] found in modern English)…The pronunciation of Chaucer’s writing otherwise differs most prominently from Modern English in that his language had not undergone the Great Vowel Shift: pronouncing Chaucer’s vowels as they would be pronounced today in European languages like Italian, Spanish or German generally produces pronunciations more like Chaucer’s own than Modern English pronunciation would.
The Great Vowel Shift was [emphasis mine]:
…a massive sound change affecting the long vowels of English during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. Basically, the long vowels shifted upwards; that is, a vowel that used to be pronounced in one place in the mouth would be pronounced in a different place, higher up in the mouth…[It] did not happen overnight. At any given time, people of different ages and from different regions would have different pronunciations of the same word. Older, more conservative speakers would retain one pronunciation while younger, more advanced speakers were moving to a new one; some people would be able to pronounce the same word two or more different ways.
Hmmm—“older, more conservative speakers;” that rings a faint bell of recognition, although I hardly would call the “thuh” newcomers “more advanced speakers.” But perhaps they are, if “advanced” means “looking towards the future” (see definitions 3 and 4 here).
If some of you are still a bit puzzled as to the particulars of the Great Vowel Shift, perhaps this will help out with some examples (and there’s a lot more here, in case your appetite remains unslaked):
This means that the vowel in the English word “date” was in Middle English pronounced [aË] (similar to modern dart); the vowel in “feet” was [eË] (similar to modern fate); the vowel in “wipe” was [iË] (similar to modern weep); the vowel in “boot” was [oË] (similar to modern boat); and the vowel in “house” was [uË] (similar to modern whose).
Isn’t it fortunate that we don’t have to learn this stuff consciously, but instead imbibe it effortlessly when we are mere babes? Otherwise, it would probably be just too difficult.
But why, oh why, the Great Vowel Shift? And for that matter, why oh why the un-great “thee and thuh” shift? The latter may just be a trend towards standardization and simplicity rather than diversification: instead of two, we would now have one pronunciation for the word “the” that doesn’t vary.
But the cause of the former remains a mystery, although theorizing abounds, naturally. The gist of it is that the Great Shift occurred in a time of upheaval and migration after the Black Death, and seems to have also represented a trend towards standardization of vowel sounds.
One thing seems clear: the changes were not haphazard. Although there were exceptions and peculiarities, the pattern of change was in one direction only. The short vowels were unaffected, as were the basic consonants. It was the long vowel sounds that changed, from a Romance and/or Latinate language pattern to one in which the tongue’s position consistently came more forward and higher in the mouth. And no one really knows why.
[NOTE: It occurs to me that, although this post may seem like a digression from my usual themes, it’s really not. I guess the topic of change just happens to fascinate me.
And for those who so desire, here’s the T-shirt:
[ADDENDUM: And if you want to hear some even older poetry recited, go here.]
The link to The Anchoress’s original post on the subject isn’t broken. It’s just that the server keeps going down. The excerpted quote, though, gives you a pretty good idea of what she’s getting at.
Oh for crissakes. It’s not enough that I’m already being driven nuts by people who say “lay” when they should say “lie” or who write “it’s” when they should write “its” or who can’t tell the difference between “they’re,” “there” and “their” or “your” and “you’re” or who write songs with lines like “say a little prayer for I” or, for that matter, people who put “quotation” “marks” around “random” words — NOW I’m going to notice the way everyone pronounces the word “the”, which probably occurs in nearly every sentence ever spoken. Just what I needed.
Being a certified Usage Lunatic, as well as one of those old fogies who always uses “thee” before a word beginning with a vowel, as soon as I finished reading this post I asked the secretary in my office, who’s 20 years younger than I am, please to say out loud the words spelled by “t-h-e a-p-p-l-e”. Sure enough, she said “thuh apple” and, when I commented on it, explained that she never pronounces it “thee” and never heard of any rule that she should do so — even though, once she tried it, she agreed that “thee egg” or “thee apple” is easier to say.
Thanks a bunch, Ms. Neo, you have just done me in once and for all.
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Mrs Whatsit:
But my post was meant to give a comforting morsel of historical perspective! After all, if people survived the Great Vowel Shift, can we not survive the Lesser?
And although I’m loathe to add to the psychological burdens of any of my readers—after all, the times are stressful enough—why, pray tell, is there no punctuation in your name? Hmmm?
Aha. Somebody noticed! That is absolutely intentional. My name comes directly from a character in Madeleine L’Engle’s brilliant children’s novel “A Wrinkle In Time” who is one of three extraterrestrial characters rather like witches or fates: Mrs Who, Mrs Which, and Mrs Whatsit. I spell it the way I do because that’s the way L’Engle (I almost called her Ms. L’Engle, but she would have hated that) intended it to be spelled.
L’Engle was American but attended European schools and grew up preferring English spellings and usage, which include Mr and Mrs instead of Mr. and Mrs. In her essay collection “A Circle of Quiet,” she describes making the deliberate decision to use the English Mrs for her three witches in “A Wrinkle in Time,” even though the book was to be published in America, because it seemed to suit their eccentric, supernatural nature. But when she got the galleys, the copy-editor had gone through and added a period to every single Mrs. Changing it would have been too costly. When the book was later published in England, the copy editors allowed her to leave out the periods because, after all, that’s how it’s done in England. But they did make another change in the book, which she had deliberately begun with that old chestnut of a first sentence, “It was a dark and stormy night.” The British galleys arrived with the following first sentence: “It was a dark and stormy night in a small village in the United States.”
You can find L’Engle’s entertaining account of these events, plus some interesting ruminations on the different connotations of “gray” vs. “grey” here:
http://www.sheilaomalley.com/archives/004344.html
I will reluctantly concede that I will probably survive the replacement of “thee” with “thuh” and even, given your attentiveness to such small details of punctuation, forgive you for forcing me to notice the change by pointing it out. And if you haven’t already read “A Wrinkle in Time,” please do. It proceeds from a philosophy about the role of humans in the battle between good and evil that I think you’ll find thought-provoking.
Mrs Whatsit: I should have known you’d have an excellent reason for your lack of punctuation.
I read that book when my son was small, but I have to say I no longer recall it.
The Great Memory Shift.
Oh, gosh, as long as were picking nits, its “I’m loath to say,” not “loathe” (unless your using the second alternate spelling).
Their, that aught to satisfy you.
/humor
I never really thought about this. I was an ace student of grammar, and still a fussbudget, as well, however when I write online, I do not adhere to classic grammar. I often use abbreviations and frequently write so quickly that typos are not unusual as are grammar infractions.
One thing I do not recall is learning a RULE for pronouncing “the” before a word beginning with a vowel. That being said, when I read Mrs. Whatsit’s post and her example of t-h-e-a-p-p-l-e, I realized I do, indeed, pronounce “the” as “thee” automatically. The pronunciation as “thuh” in such a case is absolutely discordant to my ear.
(But then again, so is the pronunciation of nuclear as “nu-q-lar” which is fairly common, and drives me crazy! So many well-educated people seem to use the latter pronunciation, and I frequently notice it with politicians and newscasters. Now that I think about it, it seems I only remember men using this pronunciation, though I’m sure there are woman who do so, as well)
My wife goes nukular when I mispronounce julery too.
I used to pronounce it nukular as a child in Maryland. As I recall, everybody did. I remember being a little disappointed when I learned that I should say “nucleear” instead because I thought “nukular” sounded scarier and more appropriate.
I don’t know if I ever learned a “rule” about thee and thuh. I think I just say it automatically, as does CSimon. It’s interesting and weird that people are starting to say it differently, as with the Great Vowel Shift. Who started it? When? Why??
I am already regretting having outed myself as a Grammar Dork because now I’m double-checking everything I type. So I’ll also agree, quickly, with CSimon that typing online is too fast and fluid a venue for obsessing over commas and apostrophes or fixing every typo. Phew!
Seeing another vowel shift now. Among young women, you’ll hear “thaht” for “that” “pahst” for “past”, and a number of others.
Also, “yes” is becoming “yuss”.
The glottal stop is supposed to be hard. Slam the windpipe shut and finish up “hit” with a hard stop instead of a tongue-to-teeth hard “t”. That’s acceptable.
But, among young people, especially women, we now hear replacing the hard stop a simple running out of air. Instead of a hard stop, the lungs simply stop pushing air. It sounds like “THAAaa…” instead of “that” pronounced either with the T or with the hard stop.
What really catches my ear is kids pronouncing “Martin”. They do a hard stop in the middle and there is a discernible pause before finishing with “in”.
Worst is swapping “een” for “ing”. Not “hittin’ and runnin'”, but “hitteen and runneen.” Terrible.
Speaking of pronunciation, is there an on-line pronunciation dictionary? If the internet contibutes to sloppy written grammar and punctuation, it should at least compensate by letting us hear how Worcestershire sauce should sound.
Neo’s shirt reminds me of an older therapeutic-mindset joke about the perfect copy editor’s T-shirt:
“Does ‘anal-retentive’ have a hyphen?”
BTW, I think I learned thuh/thee in grammar school. The nuns were pretty conservative about things like diagramming sentences and apostrophe usage. I guess the old ways have been sacrificed on the altar of self esteem. When I read Strunk and Whit, I’m taken back to 5th grade.
Strunk and White. The computer ate my e.
I would be curious to know where Richard Aubrey lives. Most of the people who are having all these problems seem to live in one dialect region that encompasses the Hudson River Valley, Western New England, and Eastern Long Island.
I see little, if any, of this out here in Ohio. From what I can tell my region is phonologically pretty stable across all age groups.
There is mentioned above that the GVS had no impact on short vowels. One curious feature of my South Midland dialect is that there are pockets along the Ohio River where for as long as I’ve known about them [and my mother grew up there] the pronunciation of short i has shifted to long e–feesh for fish, deeshes for dishes and so on. As far as I know, this pronunciation still persists among younger speakers.
I just gave my highschool senior the same test Mrs Whatsit gave her secretary. My daughter passed the test. When I initially read the article, I did not know how I pronounced “the” but I have tested myself and realize I also pronounce the word correctly.
I am a stickler for correct spelling and punctuation in email and text messaging…which drives my kids crazy. I find that when they really want something from me (money), they will do the same. Otherwise, it is BTW, TTYL, LOL, etc. Yuck!
Here in the Great Lakes we take our vowell shift seriously. Well, time to flatten some more A’s.
Not exactly a vowel shift….more like a yuppie-scum shift….but can we all please please strangle “POCK-EE-STAHN” in its little bed before it slithers out any further? So far “AF-GAN-I-STAN” has not endured this phoney baloney “foreign” pronunciation desecration.
I don’t know how the Pushtuns, Baluchis, and Punjabis pronounce Pakistan, and I sure don’t care.
I don’t care how the citizens of El Misr pronounce the name of their country either.
If we want to go “native,” I can play with the best (yo, EES-LAND, anyone?).
*************************************************
Here’s an actual punctuation question for those who care: Do the question mark and the period look OK in the sentence above? I couldn’t figure out how to eliminate one of them and still keep the sound of the question.
Joseph. Central Michigan.
Promethea: Your question is one I’ve wanted answered for a very long time. I hope someone comes round with the answer.
It is important to note (ok, maybe not that important) that the use of THEE comes before vowel SOUNDS, not vowels. You would not say THEE unicorn (y sound), but you would say THEE umbrella (u sound).
I was definitely taught this as a rule.
Punctuating parentheses: If the parentheses encompasses the whole sentence, the punctuation goes inside. If the parentheses is around a parenthetical statement at the end of a sentence, the period for the sentence goes outside the last parenthesis.
In the case above, to be proper, it should be written as one sentence with a peirod and one question with a question mark inside the parentheses, not a parenthetical question within a sentence, as in:
If we want to go “native,” I can play with the best. (Yo, EES-LAND, anyone?)
However, is it necessary to be proper in a sentence that is (a) in a comments box and (b) begins with Yo?
Oh, and one of my most memorable moments from childhood (ok, it was a nerdy honors Englishy kind of childhood) was when I was in the eight grade spelling bee.
I stepped up to the microphone and the assistant principal said, “Your word is nukular.” And I asked, to the amusment of the entire gym, “Do you mean nukular or nuclear?”
For the record, I was horrible at math. Still am.
As a student of Indo-European linguistics, I never fail to be amused by what little niggling bits of language change end up sticking in the craw of the grammar police. We live short little lives, and are only able to see the evolution of language in tiny pieces. What we process as an “accent” or dialect is, in fact, the first stage of linguistic diversification. From this, all languages are born. I don’t miss, “thee, thou” or “hither, thither, and whither,” do you?
Enjoy a great little quote I’m fond of- translated from the Latin, of course. The writer was whinging about the “bad Latin” spoken in Gaul… which we would now process as very early French.
“Spoken Latin has picked up a passel of words considered to be too casual for written Latin, and the grammar people use when speaking has broken down. The masses barely use anything but the nominative and the accusative….it’s gotten to the point that the student of Latin is writing in what is to him an artificial language, and it’s an effort for him to recite it decently.”
How cum Nu Ingland nefer gote thee message a bout thee greate vow el sheeft?
I love this post, and the comments. I’m the certified grammar geek of my Toastmasters club, and I really enjoy the distinction. I’ve noted, and fussed about, all the usages discussed here, and am absolutely adamant about another–one which has become distractingly common: Misuse of the reflexive pronouns. We’ve all heard it, and we hear it with increasing frequency. For example, “The field operations were carried out by John and myself.” This one carries the added burden of over-reliance on the passive voice, but using the reflexive form rather than the simple pronoun drives me nearly to distraction. I don’t know where it comes from, or why people seem to favor it. I think it may be a result of a desire to sound more thoughtful, educated, or intelligent. However, it is none of these.
I also avoid the use of “fun” as an adjective. It’s properly used as a noun. I, myself, have never had a fun time. However, I think this post is a lot of fun, myself.
Thanks!
In the cosmic scheme of things, the great vowel shift doesn’t rate, since pretty soon all written English will be textese, viz., “How r u doing?”
Having said that, I fully subscribe to Mrs Whatsit’s points. My advice regarding “its” and “it’s”: if you don’t know which one to use, decide which one you think is correct, then use the other. For some reason most people would do better flipping a coin.
Random quotation marks for emphasis (I really “mean” this) also are the unmistakable hallmarks of the ill-educated.
Let me add two more personal irritants: the now ubiquitous use on the Web of “loose” for “lose” (“Did the Yankees win or loose today?” Aaargh!), and the peculiar inverted shopping mall syntax of “all items not shown.” Wouldn’t you think that someone writing this would realize that it literally means no items are shown?
Nmissi, I have been informed that German used to feature the same subject-verb-object structure as English, but underwent its own shift to subject-object-verb several centuries ago when Hapsburg bureaucrats like this to speak began as a pseudo-erudite status signifier.
Do you know if that is true?
PA Cat: Not to be outdone, we used to ask if the dash in anal-retentive is an en-dash or an em-dash.
Neo and the “thee” crowd: Forty years ago this was a joke in Texas. If your bumper sticker said your allegiance was to The University, it meant UT at Austin, but if your allegiance (and your money) went to Thee University, it meant Baylor, a Baptist school in Waco. It is only recently that I’ve heard “thee” used in normal speech as you have described. I grew up using “thuh.” Any confusion is clarified by slowing speech between the words. The use of “thee” sounds rather pretentious to me, but no more so than adding “-r” to the end of a word ending in a vowel that precedes a word beginning in a vowel. An example is, “Dianer and Charles.” I understand that’s a Britishism but hear it occasionally from people from the NYC area and points north. I’m interested to learn that “thee” is actually taught in some parts of the country, and wonder if it can be traced to certain regions.
I think this one comes from trying to avoid saying “me,” because the other common alternative construction is “The field operations were carried out by John and I.”
Yet another example where most people would be better off making random choices.
For the its versus it’s problem, it helps to remember that its is a possessive pronoun just like his and hers. Neither of those have apostrophes, nor should its. “The dog dropped its bone.” NOT The dog dropped it is bone. It’s, of course, is the contraction of it is. When you don’t know which to use, try substituting it is to see if the sentence still makes sense.
To decide whether to use I or me, remove the first object and leave in the pronoun.
For example, to decide if it is:
“He gave the book to my sister and I.”
OR
“He gave the book to my sister and me.”
Try saying it:
“He gave the book to me.”
AND
“He gave the book to I.”
Pretty obvious, isn’t it? People often use “I” because they think it sounds more proper, but it’s wrong.
(Way back when I spent my entire undergraduate career working in the university’s writing center as a tutor. To help my students, I had to come up with zillions of explanations and examples.I have never forgotten them.)
BTW, I came here via The Anchoress. Love her.
expat, I am happy to say that there IS an online pronunciation dictionary! Type in dictionary.reference.com to go to “Dictionary.com,” which offers free pronunciations on many
words, including proper names. It’s absolutely great on obscure place names and unusual or archaic words, such as I might find in a poem that I have to teach!
Occam’s Beard, thanks for bringing up reflexives! I try to cure my students of the misuse of “myself” by reminding them of that little scene in Austen Powers, International Man of Mystery: “Allow myself to introduce [embarrassed pause] myself.”
Whoops–I mistakenly connected Austin Powers to Jane Austen. Oh, dear.
AnnF, I’ve advocated an even simpler method for those who don’t get nominative and objective cases: if it’s preceded by a preposition, it’s “me.” That nails all the indirect object uses. The crude corollary: if it’s near the end of the sentence, it’s “me” – nails it for those who’ve never quite grasped direct objects.
Conversely, I suppose a rough and ready rule for those who who really struggle with this is, “if it’s near the beginning of the sentence, it’s “I,” otherwise it’s “me.”
Now that nominative and objective cases have been brought up (*cough*), who’s going to bring up “who” and “whom?”
“Eats Shoots and Leaves” is indispensible.
Also hilarious.
Churchill, I think it was, said that you put commas in where the spoken sentence requires them. So speak it, if puzzled, and insert as obvious.
Yeah, “loose” for “lose” drives me up the freakin’ wall. And it’s rapidly becoming ubiquitous.
The stuff you learn studying languages, grammar, and linguistics.
For example, there is no past tense in English for the verb to go. Instead, we use the past tense of the verb to wend.
The pronoun you is actually the objective (accusative) case of the second person personal plural pronoun ye from early Modern English. So early Modern English has all the grammatical persons, singular and plural, that you might remember from studying French or German: I, thou, he/she/it, we, ye, they (in the nominative case).
And since we have Shakespeare, Donne, et al, they are still with us.
I’ve done my best to get rid of “whom.” When is the last time you heard anyone say “whom”? I’m sure it’s on the way out.
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I was taught “thee before vowels” in grade school, with the exception being a long “u”, as in ‘the union’ and thee before consonants for emphasis.
While we’re talking proper usage an’ all:
“Could you borrow me a quarter?” Has anyone else ever been panhandled like that before? It’s like nails on a blackboard.
*cough* *cough*
I must confess to using it all the time, and to appreciating those who do likewise. It’s something of an intellectual shibboleth now. Using it is easy enough; by happy coincidence (/g), it follows the same rules set out above for “I” and “me.”
Promethea! For whom, exactly, do you suppose you speak?
And:
As a student of Indo-European linguistics, I never fail to be amused by what little niggling bits of language change end up sticking in the craw of the grammar police. We live short little lives, and are only able to see the evolution of language in tiny pieces. What we process as an “accent” or dialect is, in fact, the first stage of linguistic diversification. From this, all languages are born. I don’t miss, “thee, thou” or “hither, thither, and whither,” do you?
Please fix: There should be a period after the “whither,” and then a captial D for the clause “Do you?”
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
* * *
All that said, split infinitives don’t happen to bother me. Neither do sentences that end with prepositions. Dangling participles, on the other hand, drive me up the wall.
And when someone says “lay” for “lie,” I get pretty bent out of shape.
I’m an editor. (No, really; I am.) I am frequently reminded by those I work with that “we aren’t trying to save civilization,” to which I sometimes reply, “I am.”
Remember W.H. Auden?–“Time . . . worships language.”
Once you’ve heard people attempting to write a comedy sketch in really bad Elizabethan, simply because they never read enough Shakespeare to understand the underlying structure, you’ll want there to be some thread that ties us to the past . . . and the future.
Offered without comment.
For Stumbley
An explanaton for your ‘julery’ is the British (also Canadian) spelling. Jewelry vs. Jewellery.
It’s a fairly common pronunciation here in New England, especially among those of us of Canadian descent.
Oops- I didn’t get the quote tags right; sorry! That last bit was in answer to Occam’s Beard, above.
Oblio said: “For example, there is no past tense in English for the verb to go. Instead, we use the past tense of the verb to wend.”
Oblio, you have made my morning! I didn’t know that and I love the thoght that we are still using that lovely romantic old-fashioned word in our daily conversation.
As for Promethea, who wants to destroy the useful and innocent “whom,” I’m sorry, but this means war. Who would attack such a simple and significant distinction when there are so many to whom it matters so much?
Finally, here’s my husband’s favorite formulation regarding its v. it’s. He didn’t write this — he found it somewhere, though I don’t know where.
It’s is not its, it isn’t ain’t, and it’s it’s, not its, if you mean it is. If you don’t, it’s its. Then too, it’s hers. It isn’t her’s. It isn’t our’s either. It’s ours, and likewise yours and theirs.
I have to stick up for Promethea. “Whom” is… irksome. It’s a clunky, artificially preserved, and unnecessary accoutrement, more often misused than not. Is it just me, or does “whom” in spoken speech always seem to be sort of pompous? As if a speaker is going, “Look at me! How much more grandly I speak than the rest of you!”
“Whom” has wormed its way into my writing, picked up from passing literature, no doubt… but in everyday speech, I can think of no occasion where I would need “whom” to make myself understood. If we’re going to hang on to “whom,” then why not “whan”? Why keep one case and ditch the other? Is the accusative less important than the dative?
It seems likely that everyone here would greatly enjoy Dr. John McWhorter’s The Story of Human Language, from The Teaching Company. Highly recommended!
I don’t worry much about the use of “whom” in spoken language — it’s one of many distinctions that doesn’t seem to matter nearly as much in casual speech as it does in formal writing.
In writing, though, why on earth not use it? It’s irrelevant whether or not it’s logical — much of our grammar and usage is entirely illogical. But in today’s usage, in written language (not counting online comments, naturally), using “who” when “whom” is correct is jarringly wrong and ugly and brands the whole piece of writing as suspect. (The same is true of mixing up “lie” and “lay”, a distinction which has almost completely vanished, to my sorrow — but I won’t get started on that.)
Who and whom is so easy. Checking it takes five seconds, no more. Just substitute “he” or “him” in the sentence. If you’d use “him”, use “whom.” If you’d use “he,” use “who.” Done.
Mrs Whatsit,
There’s a typo in your It’s/its ditty. the fourth word doesn’t belong.
Not good to have typos in grammar discussions.
Let me know when you ditch your husband.
The way it’s done out here in Arizona — or at least in my family — is that “thuh” is used before words beginning with a consonant, and something closer to “thee” is used before words beginning with vowels. So, for example, the two occurrences of “the” in “the way” and “the only way” are pronounced differently.
I think the unconscious reason I do this is that the two vowels slide together more neatly. Pronouncing it “thuh only way” brings in a sort of miniature glottal stop between the two words, which doesn’t sound good to my ear when I try it.
First off — not a new thing. Shakespeare used it — ” Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame”, that sort of thing. It’s a lot easier to pronounce if you elide either the schwa or the vowel, and I would expect this to begin happening.
Second — Michigan is in pretty much the same big dialectal area as Chicago and New York. It’s not Midland. The changes you’re describing are mostly the result of pushing Northern city vowels to the next level. Teenage girls lead this process because they like to talk fast and in a high pitch; middleaged men are next.
You can learn more about all this at the Phonological Atlas of North America:
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/home.html
Third — The same word is pronounced different ways by almost everybody who lives in an area where dialects meet. When the big dialect mapping by telephone project was going on, I gather that they had no end of fun and frustration with this, as people would indeed pronounce the same word different ways in the course of a single sentence. It’s not ignorance, and indeed there seem to be subtle rules to the choice of pronunciation (probably something to do with the preceding pitch and vowels). So I doubt very much that this worried the younger people during the Great Vowel Shift. It’s a normal thing to do for people from such areas (like me), and if the various dialects persist in mixing, the several pronunciations persist from generation to generation.
I’m glad to see we’re still having fun with language and grammar!
fmt: “There’s a typo in your It’s/its ditty. the fourth word doesn’t belong.
Not good to have typos in grammar discussions.
Let me know when you ditch your husband.”
You are quite right and in fact, I came here because my aggravated husband informed me that I had mangled his ditty and had better fix it before HE ditched ME. (I’ll let you know if he does.)
Furthermore, I have been committing typos in this grammar discussion right and left. Upstream, for example, I typed “thoght” for “thought.” I would retire from the battlefield altogether if I weren’t having so much fun.
So here’s how it should read. Kindly disregard the mangled version above.
It’s is not, it isn’t ain’t, and it’s it’s, not its, if you mean it is. If you don’t, it’s its. Then too, it’s hers. It isn’t her’s. It isn’t our’s either. It’s ours, and likewise yours and theirs.
I don’t miss, “thee, thou” or “hither, thither, and whither,” do you?
Yes, I do. Having to use “you” where the French would use either “tu” or “vous” leaves me in a place where I can’t indicate my social relationship to someone without having to go all around Robin Hood’s barn to explain it, or to imply it, which is a waste of my literary time.
I am inclined to agree with you that the way we actually do speak and write at the moment is primary, and attempts to “purify” English are a piece of foolishness. The Academie Francais is very likely to leave French as dead as Latin in a century or two.
English does not have grammar, it has manners, and what is good manners depends upon the time, the place, and the company. I speak or write my own dialect and its common diction and vocabulary more purely when among those who hear or read nothing else, save what is on television. And I do this whether it meets scholarly standards of grammar, or elocutionary standards of pronunciation, or not. To do any differently is to “put on airs”, it is bad manners.
When under no such constraint, as here, I let my reading inform my writing to the end of both saying what I mean and meaning what I say, keeping always in mind that the point of language is communication and not the other way around.
Beyond that however, one of the graces of prose is the cultivation of the particular human voice behind the words, leaving the reader in no doubt as to how I feel about something, and who is doing the feeling, without having to resort to smiley faces or typesetter’s equivalents. 🙁
But if such things find a permanent place in our common prose it will be bad English manners not to use them when appropriate.
That having been said, many, if not most, losses of language are losses of common culture, When railroad magnate Jay Gould was asked at the Senate investigation where the money went, he replied, “Senator, it has gone to where the woodbine twineth.” Now I not only know what he meant, I also recognize what else he was communicating about his time, his place, his situation, and his common culture with the Senators quizzing him.
But the younger someone is than me, the less likely they are to know these things. They are losing the common culture that I still share with Jay Gould. They are not likely to smell the honeysuckle scent of woodbine on the Internet nor are they likely to read or write “twineth” even though it is still available to them.
This is an out-and-out loss because there is nothing to replace it. And even if there is no utilitarian purpose to understanding Jay Gould, it is sad that, as time passes, fewer and fewer of us will.
An anecdote follows about another kind of vowel shift: that from migration: where “cain’t” is changed to “can’t” and “mah do-ag” is changed to “my dog.”
My mother was an Okie who married a northerner, and spent the rest of her life in the north. One time I asked her why she had lost her Okie accent, while a cousin who had also moved north had not.
My mother replied that she had grown tired of total strangers coming up to her, putting their arms on her and asking “What part of Texas are you from, honey?”
Resistance to language change is not futile. Change is inevitable, but should not be hastened. We inhabit a culture that is chronocentric, believing that our own wonderful selves have little to learn from the past. Retaining older forms allows us to hear our recent ancestors more clearly.
If one reads any average text from the early 19th C, it sounds over-formal to the ear. We would no longer phrase things the same way. Still, the meaning is understandable to us, and we can thus take some sustenance from the thoughts of our predecessors. If we hasten language change, it is our own voices that we silence.
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Nmissi, thanks for your response to my query.
True, but that sets the bar pretty low. Agreement in number between subject and verb isn’t generally necessary to making oneself understood, as we was discussing the other day. /g
nmissi,
Grammatically, your description of German word order is correct, and there is a logic to the system. I do, however, wonder whether it is retained as a suspense element. Otherwise people might fall asleep after the verb and before the 4 paragraphs worth of subordinant phrases are complete. Even after 20+ years in Germany, I still have trouble speaking some complex sentences correctly. I won’t talk about how hard I have to concentrate on hearing telephone numbers: six and eighty, seven and forty, five, three and sixty. I always repeat the number one digit at a time.
The word order difference makes it great fun to listen to the necessarily choppy simultaneous translations. I can’t take more than about 15 minutes of them, no matter how interested I am in the topic. I can imagine nother worse that being in the EU Parliament and spending days listening to translated blah blah.
Sorry for taking this so far off topic.
Thanks for the tip, Jeannine
I’m so glad to hear you say that. My German is very rusty now (I minored in German literature in college), and so I listen to Deutsche Welle on the net, but to this day I still have trouble with German numbers of three or more digits. For non-German speakers, Germans start such numbers from the left until they get to the tens place, then jump to the units and work backwards (so 1234 would be “one thousand two hundred four and thirty”). I stumble over this every time!
Thuh for consonants. Thee for vowels. Except the letter “U”. I always say thuh before a word beginning with “U”.
I don’t really know why, except to say it’s easier to roll from one word into the other when pronounced that way.
Wait, I’m liar. “Thee” before “um” That’s the exception there.
Joseph Marshall, I’ll gladly support the need for a second person plural. Indeed, that’s why my beloved “y’all” exists; nice folk trying to tidy up uncertainties in the language. But I’m not sure how much need we really have for a formal/informal distinction. Rather democratic of us all, really.
And a hearty “Amen” to that. The very idea of an official body putting their stamp of approval or disapproval onto language rather offends me. Living languages change, they evolve according to the needs of their speakers. The only unchanging language is a dead one.
But I take issue with this idea that “English does not have grammar, it has manners”… that does not work for me. English has always had structure and rules. Every native speaker of English absorbs this grammar in their cradle, and they do not make “mistakes” in this native grammar. The problem is that so many of the rules imposed on us by our English teachers are arbitrary and WRONG, they’re attempts to force English to follow the pattern of other languages. I refuse to have my language dictated to me by dead guys with a fetish for Greek and Latin.
Speaking of pet peeves in grammar, the lack of a following comma in, e.g., Dallas, Texas, is ubiquitous these days and highly annoying. “I went to Allston, Massachusetts for a reunion” makes me want to slap the author.
Also, I too miss the more precise ‘thee, thou, thy, thine.’ Alas, I fear they are lost forever. Whom is also precise and useful.
I thought I’d point out that Michigan has four dialects. As you see from the map here – http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/maps/MapsIN/TelsurIN_eo.html – the peninsulas have different regional accents and residents of the southernmost section of the lower peninsula has the same speech as the residents of the Ohio prairie. What the map doesn’t show is the bleeding over from Ontario along the Lake Huron coastline; e.g Port Huron (or “Porcharn” as locals call it).
Today I have stumbled upon this riveting discussion, which I have loved. Finding a discussion of language and grammar is a delight. Thank you.
For “the” before a vowel, I usually go with “thee” approaching “th'”–give priority to the first vowel sound of the next word.