The Old English Words That Goed Through the Vowel Shift

In the prologue to the canterbury tales chaucer used the word ride. He would have pronounced it read, and at least in some places, he spelled it r i d e. Overtime, the pronunciation shifted from read to ride, but that common spelling remained the same. Other european languages didn't make that change. Most of them continued to use the letter i to represent its traditional e sound. And lish continued to borrow words from those languages after the sound had shifted within english. So when those words came into english, they came in with their e sounds, which were still represented by letter i.