The Great Val Shift

The great val shift presumably got under way at some point in the late 13 hundreds. Some scholars think it might have even been sooner than that. In some places, english speakers started to change the way they pronounced that e sound when it was pronounced as a long vowel. Instead of saying e, which is a pure vowel sound, they began to put a little sound in front of it. And that new sound was a or a instead of e. So if that history is a guide, pronunciations like anti and via may eventually give way to anti and via.