Review of Vowels

NOTE: THIS VIEWER IS STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION. IT IS NOT PART OF THE ASSIGNED EXERCISES FOR CB45.

Current version (as of November 1, 2002) of the English Vowel History Viewer will open in a new window.

The vowel pages now include more detailed information about the chronology of the Tudor Vowel Shift. This change entailed expanding the coverage of some of the lines of vowel development in the Early Modern period to two or three separate frames where the information was previously summarized in one Early Modern frame. The enhanced detail is accompanied by citations of sources on phonology beyond  Algeo: principally Charles Barber's Early Modern English , also including Manfred Görlach's The Linguistic History of English and E. J. Dobson's English Pronunciation 1500-1700 , second edition, volume II.

These enhancements will help a user of the vowel viewer to distinguish sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century forms when reconstructing historical pronunciations. In some cases the new pages need to be completed with links to new audio clips of pronunciations.

The current version of the vowel pages incorporates compressed files in the QuickTime (.mov) format. This has allowed faster loading of the pages and has also reduced demands on the user's computer system. Until recently, the audio links were working properly on both the networked Macs and PC's on campus.

Please send comments to marler@post.harvard.edu .