I got a book for my birthday called, 'The Adventure of English'. It was a bit simplistic and repetitive (when I finished it I discovered it is the book of a radio series so that explains it), and blindly repeated as fact a few of those dreadful 'mythetymology' acronym explanations. However, it did have some interesting parts and I'm prone to the odd home scholar mistake meself so we'll let it off. One thing this book did talk about was, 'The Great Vowel Shift' and how this stole the song from Chaucer and other early works. I've been doing a bit of looking about, and no-one seems to know how or why this happened. Does anyone here have any pet theories? I would be interested to know. Also, I've been listening to some examples of Middle English speech, and some of the lost vowels seem to me to be very much alive: on Tyneside, in the West Country, on Merseyside and in Lancashire. What d'yall think?


**edit**just listened to another example of late middle english, and it sounded remarkably like an english person doing a bad impression of a french person speaking english like in that awful sitcom 'allo allo'