The Second Major Step in the Great Val Shift

The e sound changed to a new sound. That meant that the e sound wasn't really being used any more. Other words could now use that sound without creating confusion or overlap with the words that had that sound before. There were lots of words affected by this shift. For example, bait became beat, tre became tree, ba became b sweat became sweet, breath became brief and so on again. This type of order in spacing was usually maintained in the great vowe shift. It appears that speakers generally tried to avoid mergers. If two different vowel sounds crashed together, it would create a bunch of words that sounded the same. The original sound of this vowl was traditionally spelled with letter