![]() In Bavarian, viel is not pronounced as /fiːl/ and ein Haufen is not pronounced /aɪ̯n ˈhaʊ̯fm̩/. Now that I have zeroed in on German, I'll just take Bavarian as an example. English, however, traditionally lacks such regulatory bodies.Īnyhow, vowel shifts happen all the time, especially on the dialect level. On a more general note, I will say that spelling reforms are the domain of politicians, one of the most prominent and recent examples being the German orthography reform of 1996, kicked off by the Conference of Ministers of Culture and later monitored by the International Commission for German Orthography. Now, it's always a bit harder to explain the absence of something rather than its presence, though one of the other answers does provide an interesting link. In other words, what made the pronunciation stray so far from spelling in English was not the Great Vowel Shift it was the absence of the accompanying Great Spelling Update. Hence the popular but wrong assumption that there weren't pronunciation shifts to begin with. The pronunciation shifts were accompanied by spelling shifts, if you will. It's just that there was at least some concerted effort to keep the spelling consistent with the (changing) pronunciation. Speaking of Germanic languages, the most notable vowel shifts happened in German and Dutch (Wikipedia even mentions them in the article on the Great Vowel Shift). It happens to native German speakers all the time. If you don't know how to correctly pronounce Soest, Troisdorf, Huonker, Pankow, Laermann, Hueck, you will pronounce them wrong. Secondly, don't get me started on German. ![]() Also, in Old Church Slavonic, there were a number of nasal sounds, which are absent in pretty much all contemporary Slavic languages with the notable exception of Polish. In contemporary Russian, it can be anything from a schwa to an ʌ to an ɔ, depending on the position relative to the stressed syllable (e.g. Since you mentioned Slavic languages, as the most obvious example, in Old Church Slavonic, an o was an o. And they are even happening right now as we speak.īut first things first. Generally speaking, there have been similar shifts in many other languages. ![]() I started off by posting a series of comments scattered all over the page, but I thought I should sum them up in a standalone answer. ![]()
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