English's great "vowel movement," or "shift happens, baby!"

[FanDeAliFee]

Students native in a European language other than English can have a lot of trouble with English vowels, because English doesn't follow the common pattern of pronunciation. Perhaps most vividly for Alizée fans is the example provided when she start to sing Fifty-Sixty.

Below find a brief explanation of this divergence, made by excerpting the references provided by online pages which are linked.

Everything2
"The Great Vowel Shift is what divides Middle English (the language of Chaucer) from Modern English, the earliest monuments of which include Shakespeare and the King James Bible... When you study European languages you find the vowels are usually similar... [But] with all the... long vowels... English is often nothing like the continental."

Wikipedia
"The Great Vowel Shift was a major change in the pronunciation of the English language... the two highest long vowels became diphthongs, and the other five underwent an increase in tongue height with one of them coming to the front... The surprising speed and the exact cause of the shift are continuing mysteries..."

a student's class oration
"If anyone is interested in reading this, this is a speech I typed and delivered for my Communications Class of Public Speaking on The Transition of the English Language... If you want to get an idea of what the Vowel Shift sounded like, listen to pirate talk in the next pirate movie you see. Linguists speculate that 'Pirate English' remained stuck in this vowel shift because these raiders lived far away from where standardized English was developing. Instead of saying mate, the pirates say mataye as in 'ahoy mataye.'"

I'd hate to think this means Lilly need study with Fée Clochette's nemesis Captain Hook!