Certain aspects of English phonology bother me from a purely aesthetic perspective, and I'm wondering whether they could have been butterflied away with a 16c POD.
Namely, the Great Vowel Shift wasn't completely symmetric. In the front vowels, the Middle English vowels shifted /aɪ ɛː eː iː/ > /eɪ iː iː aɪ/ and then /aː/ > /eː/ > /eɪ/; in the back, they shifted /aʊ ɔː oː uː/ > /ɔː oʊ uː aʊ/. The changes to the high vowels (/iː uː/ > /aɪ aʊ/) were inevitable, and happened also in Dutch and German, and having the mid-high vowels fill in (/eː oː/ > /iː uː/, whence the present-day pronunciation of ee and oo) is also natural. But in the other Germanic languages, there was no creation of a new low back phoneme like /ɔː/ (spelled au), and the long a vowel stayed in place, without shifting as in English.
Could something more symmetric have happened? What I imagine is that i-e, ee, ou, and oo are pronounced as in OTL; both mid-high vowels shift like oa, i.e. /ɛː ɔː/ > /eː oː/ > /eɪ oʊ/, so that sea is merged with say and not with see; /aʊ/ > /oʊ/ mirroring earlier /aɪ/ > /eɪ/, so that caught merges with coat and tall merges with toll; and /aː/ is left alone, so that the words late, pane, name, and sale are pronounced with the same vowel as father.
In the short vowels, what I'd like is to avoid that awful /ʊ/ > /ʊ, ʌ/ split, which makes it impossible to figure out how a short u is pronounced. Is it put, or putt? But that's easy enough - evidently, Northern England resisted this monstrosity entirely.
If the triple merger of /eʊ iʊ y/ (spelled ew and u-e) into /juː/ could be replaced with a merger into /eʊ/, then all the better. But the diphthong /eʊ/ is cross-linguistically rare, even more so than /ɔɪ/, which managed to survive, so this may be asking too much.
The resulting vowel space would be more stable, and avoid the various mergers between short and long vowels that we see in American English (father ~ bother universally west of Boston, cot ~ caught in most accents). There would be five short stressed vowels, each with a long counterpart, as in German without the umlauts; the long mid vowels, spelled ea and oa, would be diphthongs, pronounced the same as ai and au. There would be four additional diphthongs, /aʊ aɪ/ and the less common /ɔɪ eʊ/.
Namely, the Great Vowel Shift wasn't completely symmetric. In the front vowels, the Middle English vowels shifted /aɪ ɛː eː iː/ > /eɪ iː iː aɪ/ and then /aː/ > /eː/ > /eɪ/; in the back, they shifted /aʊ ɔː oː uː/ > /ɔː oʊ uː aʊ/. The changes to the high vowels (/iː uː/ > /aɪ aʊ/) were inevitable, and happened also in Dutch and German, and having the mid-high vowels fill in (/eː oː/ > /iː uː/, whence the present-day pronunciation of ee and oo) is also natural. But in the other Germanic languages, there was no creation of a new low back phoneme like /ɔː/ (spelled au), and the long a vowel stayed in place, without shifting as in English.
Could something more symmetric have happened? What I imagine is that i-e, ee, ou, and oo are pronounced as in OTL; both mid-high vowels shift like oa, i.e. /ɛː ɔː/ > /eː oː/ > /eɪ oʊ/, so that sea is merged with say and not with see; /aʊ/ > /oʊ/ mirroring earlier /aɪ/ > /eɪ/, so that caught merges with coat and tall merges with toll; and /aː/ is left alone, so that the words late, pane, name, and sale are pronounced with the same vowel as father.
In the short vowels, what I'd like is to avoid that awful /ʊ/ > /ʊ, ʌ/ split, which makes it impossible to figure out how a short u is pronounced. Is it put, or putt? But that's easy enough - evidently, Northern England resisted this monstrosity entirely.
If the triple merger of /eʊ iʊ y/ (spelled ew and u-e) into /juː/ could be replaced with a merger into /eʊ/, then all the better. But the diphthong /eʊ/ is cross-linguistically rare, even more so than /ɔɪ/, which managed to survive, so this may be asking too much.
The resulting vowel space would be more stable, and avoid the various mergers between short and long vowels that we see in American English (father ~ bother universally west of Boston, cot ~ caught in most accents). There would be five short stressed vowels, each with a long counterpart, as in German without the umlauts; the long mid vowels, spelled ea and oa, would be diphthongs, pronounced the same as ai and au. There would be four additional diphthongs, /aʊ aɪ/ and the less common /ɔɪ eʊ/.
