The History of English Vowel Sounds

Today there's a great deal of variation in the pronunciation of English vowels. The biggest change in the English vowel sounds occurred at the end of the Middle English period, around the year 1500. Old English scribes generally used letter combinations to represent the other dozen or so phonemes that weren't represented by those 24 old English letters. And let me make a few final notes about the original English alphabet before I conclude.