Modern English: The Expread Of The English Language

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When someone knows a language, they can typically speak the language and understand the words, structure, and the meaning when someone is speaking the same language. Therefore, it would be in the best interest to make sure that everyone is on the same page—make sure that the sentence structure, every words’ meaning, everyone’s understanding of proper grammar is the same throughout the whole world. That’s precisely what the Spanish, French, and Italians did, creating centers for their languages in Madrid, Paris, and Rome, respectively, to make sure that no matter how far the language spread, the basic aspects of the language stayed consistent. English, on the other hand, has no center for the English language. English is the world’s most widespread …show more content…

Inconsistencies and irregularities in English have seemingly increased in number throughout the history of the English language. There are multiple reasons why. First, gradual changes in pronunciation, such as the Great Vowel Shift, explain a tremendous number of irregularities. Secondly, there was a major change in the English language during the Norman Conquest that saw English adopt a lot of French spelling conventions. Thus it changed the convention for spelling for future words in English. Lastly, recent loan words from other languages, due to British colonialism, maintain their original spellings, which do not make phonetic sense in English. The Romanization of languages, such as Chinese, through the utilization of alphabets derived from the Phoenician based alphabet has only made this issue worse, for example when pronouncing Chinese names or …show more content…

Its result was a new phonemic representation of words and morphemes. This series of linguistic sound changes towards the end of this period, including the Great Vowel Shift, resulted in the i in mine. The seven long, or tense vowels of Middle English underwent a change. The high vowels /iː/ and /u:/ became diphthongs, and the long vowels increased in tongue height. Long vowels in Middle English had values much like those in Italian and Standard German, but in standard Modern English they have entirely different pronunciations. This saw /iː/ become/aɪ/, /eː/ and /ɛː/ became /iː/, /aː/ became /eɪ/, /uː/ became/aʊ/, /oː/ became /uː/, and /ɔː/ became /o/ (Fromkin, Rodman, Hyams; 342). These changes are one of the most dramatic examples of sounds shift. As a result of it, the phonemic representation of many words changed. Examples of this include: please—pleasant, sane—sanity, crime—criminal, and sign—signal. The changes that occurred took place over several centuries. It can be divided into two phases. In the first phase, the close vowels /iː uː/ were affected, and the close-mid vowels /eː oː/: /eː oː/ were raised to /iː uː/, and /iː uː/ became the diphthongs /ei ou/ or /əi əu/. Then in the second phase the open vowel /aː/ was affected, and the open-mid vowels /ɛː ɔː/: /aː ɛː ɔː/ were raised, changing to /eː iː oː/(Fromkins, Rodman, Hyams; 343). Prior to this change, the vowels in each pair were

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