It had much the same value as written long e has in most modern European languages. For example, Middle English 'long e' in Chaucer's 'sheep' had the value of Latin 'e' (and sounded like Modern English 'shape' in the International Phonetic Alphabet ). Old and Middle English were written in the Latin alphabet and the vowels were represented by the letters assigned to the sounds in Latin.
This is due to what is called The Great Vowel Shift.īeginning in the twelfth century and continuing until the eighteenth century (but with its main effects in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries) the sounds of the long stressed vowels in English changed their places of articulation (i.e., how the sounds are made). But the 'long' vowels are regularly and strikingly different. And the short vowels are very similar in Middle and Modern English. The consonants remain generally the same, though Chaucer rolled his r's, sometimes dropped his aitches, and pronounced both elements of consonant combinations, such as 'kn,' that were later simplified. The main difference between Chaucer's language and our own is in the pronunciation of the 'long' vowels.
