Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is Episode 140.

You say tomato.

In this episode, we're going to begin our look at one of the most fascinating topics in

the overall history of the English language, the great vowel shift.

That term refers to a series of changes that affected the way many vowel sounds were pronounced

in English.

It's important to the overall story of English because it helps to explain why English words

are pronounced the way they are today, and it also helps to explain why English spelling

is so weird, because many words are spelled the way they were pronounced before the vowel

shift occurred.

But in order to understand what happened, we really need to have a sense of what vowels

are and where each vowel sound is pronounced in the mouth.

Armed with that knowledge, we can start to see how the vowels relate to each other,

and how a change in one vowel might impact the vowels around it.

So this time, we're going to take a break from our regular historical narrative, and we're

going to focus on vowels, what they are, why they're important, where they're pronounced,

and how they're spelled, and then over the next couple of episodes, we'll explore

the actual changes that are known today as the great vowel shift.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com,

and you can sign up to support the podcast and get bonus episodes and transcripts at patreon.com

slash historyofenglish.

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