From the Past Life, Present Cleavage substack, April 3:
So. Did the founding fathers sound British.
The short answer is no. The longer answer is going to make you rethink every movie and every mental image you’ve ever had of anyone who lived before 1800. I need you to be prepared for that.
The founding fathers did not sound like modern British people. But they also didn’t sound like modern Americans. Both accents have changed since 1776, which makes sense because accents are living things and 250 years is a long time. But here’s the part that’s going to ruin you: modern American accents are actually closer to what English sounded like in the 18th century than modern British accents are. The British changed more than we did. Americans are the ones who kept the old sounds. I am not ok about this.
But to explain why, I need to take you somewhere you’re not expecting. I need to take you to a plague.
In the 1300s the Black Death swept through England and killed somewhere between a third and half of the entire population. Entire villages emptied. Labor shortages reshaped the economy. And the survivors started moving. Massive waves of migration poured into London and the southeast from every corner of the country, bringing with them dozens of regional dialects that had never been in the same room before.
And somewhere in that collision of accents and dialects, something shifted. Literally. The vowels started moving.
Between roughly 1400 and 1700 every single long vowel in the English language changed how it was pronounced. It’s called the Great Vowel Shift. Before it happened, English vowels worked the way vowels work in Italian or Spanish. The letters did what they looked like they should do. “Bite” was pronounced “beet.” “House” was pronounced “hoos.” “Name” was pronounced “nahm.” “Knight” was pronounced “k-nicht” with a guttural sound at the end like you were clearing your throat. English was phonetic. The spelling matched the sounds. It made SENSE.
And then it didn’t.
All the long vowels began migrating upward in the mouth. The tongue positions shifted higher and higher over the course of about 300 years. And the vowels that were already at the top had nowhere left to go so they broke apart into two sounds. “Ee” became “eye.” “Oo” became “ow.” A 300-year linguistic pileup that nobody voted on and nobody agreed to. It just happened. And it happened during the worst possible window of time.
William Caxton brought the printing press to England in 1476. One of the most important technological developments in the history of communication. And it arrived RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE of the Great Vowel Shift.
Caxton started standardizing English spelling based on how words sounded at that exact moment. Printers needed consistency. They needed to pick a spelling and commit. So they did. But the sounds kept changing after the spelling was already locked in. The vowels were still moving. The consonants were still dropping. And the printed page couldn’t keep up.
We had ONE CHANCE to get English spelling right and we fumbled it at the worst possible moment.
This is why English spelling is a disaster. It’s not random. It’s not lazy. It’s a snapshot of a language mid-transformation that got frozen in place by a new technology and was never corrected. Every word you have ever misspelled, every silent letter that made you feel stupid, every time you stared at “knight” and thought why is there a K in this. You used to pronounce that K. You used to pronounce that GH. Those sounds died 500 years ago and the letters are still standing there like gravestones. English spelling is full of ghosts.
That’s why “food” and “good” and “blood” are spelled almost identically but sound completely different. In Chaucer’s time around the 1390s they all rhymed.....
....MUCH MORE
Okay, but why does the word Queue have four silent vowels?
