How did Otto Jespersen figure out the Great Vowel Shift? Surely, there were no pronunciation audio recordings available. How did he know how British people had pronounced vowels centuries ago? Have any of you read Jespersen's paper on the Great Vowel Shift?
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3Audio recordings from before a shift that took place four centuries ago? No, definitely none of those. But spelling is a good starting point, since English spelling was largely fixed before the GVS. That’s why English vowels are so weirdly represented in writing. To a significant degree, going back to the time before the GVS is just pronouncing the written vowels with their standard Continental values (i.e., long <a> is /aː/, not /eɪ/, long <i> is /iː/, not /aɪ/, etc.). Once you do that, you’re left with a bunch of changes that don’t fit, which is what then really required figuring out.– Janus Bahs JacquetCommented Feb 19, 2023 at 16:44
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4Jespersen himself explains in the introduction the “various ways in which the pronunciation of former periods may be ascertained” and he gives more examples in the chapter on the “Great Vowel-shift” (sic)– Alex B.Commented Feb 19, 2023 at 17:28
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3The same way that other historical pronunciations are determined: spellings, misspellings, rhymes, the representation of dialect speech in fiction, how loanwords are spelt and how they are changed (both loanwords in and out of the language), and what contemporary writers said about pronunciation (and especailly about "errors" in pronunciation).– Colin FineCommented Feb 19, 2023 at 19:13
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