Great Vowel Shift | Hacker News Reader

Great Vowel Shift

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Somewhat related, there was also a "capitalisation shift" in the late 1600s where everyone (or their editors) started writing more nouns as capitalised (e.g. "The quick brown Fox jumped over the lazy Dog"), and then switched back in the mid-1700s. Interesting to know what might have been.

https://github.com/DanielJohnBenton/capitalisation-shift-goo...

In modern German, all nouns (but not pronouns, except for formal pronouns) are capitalized.

yes, one of the strangest spelling rules. Not useful at all

I remember when I first started learning German, I thought it was useless. But after getting used to it, when I switched back to English, I was like where are all the nouns? Why is everything lowercase? It's all about what you get used to, I guess.

To maximize information content (entropy), we must try to use all symbols with equal likelihood - which this rule assists, employing capital symbols with closer to equal likelihood than their usual rarity.

Furthermore, said symbols must convey previously unknown information - which this rule does not, as the nouns have the same meaning whether capitalized as not, and the "information" conveyed is redundant.

Human languages aren’t usually concerned with maximal information density though. Multiple layers of redundancy are often present. Features like noun verb agreement, grammatical gender, pleonasms, and even redundant words (last will and testament, vim and vigor etc) are used in various languages despite the redundancy, to increase clarity.

For sure, I was makimg a haphazard joke about German efficiency. Is a pleonasm an oxymoron?

Pleonasm is more of a needless redundancy like "It's déjà vu all over again."

It helps with parsing and would disambiguate nouns from verbs (if German has words that are both noun and verb, as English does).

It has many of those verb-noun pairs.

But at the same time it interferes with the parsing of sentences by making sentence beginnings less obvious when scanning.

I find noun markers to be useful in Perl. But they convey more meaning, like number.

Maybe German language should consider a syntax highlighter?

> Not useful at all

In English, nouns are often spoken with stresses in a sentence, which could make capitalizing them a pronunciation issue, just as other punctuation is (e.g. commas for pauses, question mark for changing intonation). I don't know about German, though.

Didn't a German branch inherit the English monarchy in the late 17th Century? That timing would work out -- people adapting whatever style the monarchs used as the standard.

Early 18th, actually.

Elector Georg Ludwig of Hanover became King George I of Great Britain in 1714. This happened because the Act of Settlement 1701 declared Georg Ludwig's mother, Sophia, the heir to the throne (this was done specifically to cut off Jacobite claims), but she died a month before Queen Anne (which was a shame: by all accounts she was brilliant, and she was a patron of the sciences), so the throne went to her son.

Interestingly, High German also has experienced a pronunciation shift, but it was a consonant shift and came much earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift

Donald Trump's Twitter account nearly follows this rule, but not quite:

"4.2 million hard working Americans have already received a large Bonus and/or Pay Increase because of our recently Passed Tax Cut & Jobs Bill....and it will only get better! We are far ahead of schedule." (Feb 11, 2018)

He missed "Schedule" but incorrectly capitalized "passed". Tsk.

Missing "Schedule" isn't a big deal. During that period, English speakers didn't capitalize every noun, just the ones deemed important. Evidently Trump doesn't consider "schedule" important.

Makes sense. Trump must spend a lot of time reading 17th century classics in original editions.

Dear God am I thankful we don't do that anymore. Nothing is more annoying than hearing one's inner voice read a sentence like William Shatner

Looks like capitalization as a general emphasis - if you just scan capitalized words:

Americans Bonus Pay Increase Passed Tax Cut Jobs Bill

Makes a good summary of the points they want to emphasize, that Americans get a bonus because the government is progressing on the Republican+blue-collar agenda.

(For when tweets are TL;DR)

Having tl;dr tweets shows how far twitter has gone from the original concept.

He's probably just dictating into Android's text to speech.

Yeah the random capitalization is one of the more annoying things it does.

That doesn’t explain the often weird spelling and things like “covfefe” which must have been typed?

Android's text to speech randomly capitalizes nouns like that.

Nearly as interesting is "why" there was a great vowel shift: Plague.

While difficult to prove, it's commonly believed by linguists to have been caused, or very greatly helped along, by the bubonic plague and the extreme amount of social upheaval and migration it caused over its extended rampage through that area of the world. I was rather surprised the wikipedia entry didn't mention that factor, it was spoken of as an established fact when I was in grad school.

(https://esoterx.com/2016/04/20/language-is-a-bacterium-the-d...)

It's in there

> Some scholars[who?] have argued that the rapid migration of peoples from northern England to the southeast following the Black Death

I also tend to believe the French influence as a likely cause, also mentioned in the article.

Oh i missed that, was looking for "plague", thanks

> it's commonly believed by linguists to have been caused, or very greatly helped along, by the bubonic plague

I have a master's degree in linguistics and I've never heard about that theory before. I don't want to argue about the validity of it (obviously, because I'm not familiar with it) but I will say that I don't agree that it's commonly believed by linguists.

Just heard of "The Great Vowel Shift" on the "Lexicon Valley"[1] linguistics podcast, which covered the idiosyncrasies of English spelling, and how the vowel shift was a large factor in how pronunciations diverged from their spellings.

[1]: http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2018/0...

If you are a native English speaker trying to lean a Germainic foreign language, then retraining yourself that the vowels are pronounced

"ah, ay, e, oh, ooh"

instead of

"ay, e, eye, oh, you"

helps your pronunciation tremendously.

Virtually every language that uses the Latin alphabet follows some version of this plan for spelling vowels, not just Germanic ones. There is a reason the International Phonetic Alphabet uses the 5 basic vowel symbols /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/ this way.

As a native English speaker, this is also helpful with learning Vietnamese, which also uses the Latin alphabet.

Spanish native speaker here, but I know a little of German.

In the books of "Dora the Explorer", usually the letter "i" in Spanish is replaced by the sound that makes "ee" instead of the sound of "e". So your first list should be

"ah, ay, ee, oh, ooh"

Downsides of trying to illustrate sounds with writing without using IPA (which I do not know enough of). I'm sure we are saying the same thing.

e sounds more like `eh` though (at least in latin-derived languages and japanese). Pronouncing it `ay` is generally seen as a strong english accent.

\e\ is a sound that is basically impossible to represent unambiguously to English speakers, without falling back to how it's used in words ('e' as in 'ten', for example).

`eh` and `ay` can both easily be read as a dipthong that would be represented as `ei` in any reasonably spelled language (like Finnish).

"ei" is more "ey" tho.

I think t-eh-n is pretty illustrative of why eh works better than "ay" either way - ay is much much closer to ey and so ei.

To keep things clear: the notation you'd typically want to use with IPA when taking about sounds (phones) is [e], as in this case, and use /e/ (with forward slashes) when taking about phonemes. Not to nitpick on you specifically, I see a lot of ad-hoc notations in these comments.

Depends on the language.

In some languages it's /ɛ/ (English "eh"), in others it's /e/ (Scottish English "ay"), and in yet others it's /e̞/ (halfway between the two). It's rarely /ɛɪ/ ("ay" in most dialects of English), though it appears in many other languages written as something other than "e".

Dutch is an interesting case: /ɛ/, /e/, and /ɛɪ/ are all different phonemes (short "e", long "e"/"ee", and "ei"/"ij" respectively).

Many only have one. Greek just has /ɛ/. Japanese just has /e̞/.

Another thing an English speaker needs to learn about Germanic vowel is that they're all monophthongs.

In English, most vowel letters end up being diphthongs, and speakers have trouble pronouncing vowels without putting a diphthong-like "curve" to the end of the vowel. For example, German "so" or Scandinavian "så" have a single vowel, whereas English "so" has a diphthong that makes it rhyme with "sew" /soʊ/.

Some of the Germanic vowels are also quite different. "e" and "i" exist in English ("men", "bin", though English doesn't have the long versions, as in German "mehr"), but "u", "ü" and "y" don't.

"o" is interesting in that it only exist a silent mouth shape at the beginning of certain w- words such as "what" and "where" (/ʍ/). The English "o" used in words like "move" is different.

> In English, most vowel letters end up being diphthongs, and speakers have trouble pronouncing vowels without putting a diphthong-like "curve" to the end of the vowel.

This is overstated. I'll repeat that same sentence with diphthongs replaced by underscores:

In English, m_st v_wel letters end up being diphthongs, and speakers have trouble pron__ncing v_wels with__t putting a diphthong-l_ke "curve" to the end of the v_wel.

And "pronouncing" and "without" use digraphs for the diphthong. But even counting them, or double-counting them, or counting the "e" in like as also "being a diphthong", that doesn't look like "most vowel letters" to me.

The point wasn't to pedantically count diphthongs, it's the idea that English is biased towards them in a way that Germanic languages aren't, and which affects their pronouncation if left uncorrected. If it helps, replace "most" with "many".

This all depends on dialect, of course. Words like "ride" can occur both as diphthong (/ɹaɪd/) and monophthong (/ɹa:d/). Southern American dialects have things like vowel breaking that further puts a spin on vowels.

This has been quite a stumblingblock for the English persons I have been challenged to teach a bit of Scandinavian and/or German over the years. I remember one particularly challenging Cambridge graduate, otherwise sharp as a tack, who had enormous trouble with the the concept that vowels in general are not diphtongs, and that it doesn't really behove an Englishman to giggle over this quaint continental anomaly.

Fascinating; my son is just learning reading (English), and we start with those 'germanic' (i.e. short) vowel sounds as the default way of sounding, then try the longer sounds if it doesn't sound right (or has a modifier).

"Germanic" is a bit general, and pronounciations differ. The letter "u" is indeed "ooh" in German, but in Norwegian that sound is assigned to the letter "o", and the letter "u" (as in French) sounds like German "ü" (a sound that native English speakers are ridiculously bad at).

Also, Danish is just completely weird. I remember a Danish friend laughing at me once for pronouncing the Danish/Norwegian word "dag" (day) in Norwegian. There it's pronounced somewhat like the English "dug", but with a longer "ah" sound in the middle. In Danish it's pronounced like the English "day". WTF?

In short, there are no such general rules for "Germanic" languages, there are huge differences.

> pronouncing the Danish/Norwegian word "dag" (day) in Norwegian. ... In Danish it's pronounced like the English "day". WTF?

This is consistent with the pronunciation of "jeg" (=I, as in myself) in Norwegian, where the 'g' is a soft sound.

I wish English kept some of its runic hold overs like the letter thorn “þ” (th sound).

“þe fox ran þurh þe field.”

I could imagine the confusion for non native English speakers when they encountered:

through thought brought bought daughter

All hold overs from old English when the “gh” came from the throat and was spelled with a “ȝ”

If you've never seen Gallagher's routine on English you'll enjoy it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfz3kFNVopk

Thank you! I recalled seeing this this as a young kid. Great re-watch.

No discussion about inconsistent spelling and pronunciation is complete without The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité, a non-native speaker!

http://www.businessinsider.com/english-spelling-pronunciatio...

Daughter. Tochter.

Oh!

Having dabbled in text-to-speech algorithms, I wish English had kept both eth and thorn, or had SOME way to distinguish voiced vs unvoiced th. There are few clues.

Why are those words confusing in the context of one another? They seem pretty consistent to me as long as you aren't confused about the order of the adjacent t and h pairs.

Small anecdote from history:

Back in the days, the conservative Swiss looked down on those vowel shift hipsters in Germany and thought that the simple vowels where good enough as they were. So the Swiss-German spoken today is basically a pre-vowel-shift German, "Haus" [pron: house] vs "Huus" [pron: Hoose]. Mid/northern Germans find it super hard to understand Swiss-German (or mistake it with German spoken with a Swiss accent).

Perhaps we start to see a similar shift happening in France where yougsters start to mix up vowels in everyday words.

So how do researchers determine how words were pronounced historically without audio recordings?

I'm totally guessing, but maybe they use text that shows how something is pronounced?

Eg for one example, if you know how one word is pronounced, and you have a poem that includes that word, you can follow rhymes.

One of the ways can be through poetry. Since many poems tend to include rhymes, the pronunciation of a word can sometimes be gleaned by comparing it to its rhyme pair (there's probably an actual word for that). Of course, that presupposes you know the pronunciation of the other word.

Edit: Pretty much what edanm said. I really should do a page refresh before replying when the tab has been open for a while :)

As Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It:

And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot / And thereby hangs a tale

Which is wittier when you realise that hour was pronounced like whore in his day.

The quote I learned about the Great Vowel Shift from was Henry IV, Part I.

If reasons were as plentiful as blackberries, where the prof explained it was a pun because "reasons" was pronounced more like "raisins" in 1597.

A video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s (with examples)

Comparisons with language of the same family. If practically all modern Germanic languages use an /a/ in the word for "name", it will probably have been an /a/ as well in English. This is more or less the central procedure of comparative linguistics: finding the sound most consistent with other languages, with the least necessary assumptions. Vastly oversimplified of course, it's more complicated than just a majority rule, some sound changes are more likely than others for starters.

Comparisons with coexistent languages we know the pronunciation of. The letters used in English for vowels weren't chosen randomly, they used the letters for the corresponding vowels in (Ecclesiastical) Latin. So by knowing that in Latin the a stood for a vowel similar to /a/, you can say the same of the a in English. This is again only approximate, as not all vowels match perfectly, and English has many more vowels than Latin ever did.

Spelling errors. In graffiti in Pompeii, occasionally the -t at the end of 3rd person singular verb forms isn't written, or the -m in female accusative nouns, which means they weren't pronounced. A future historian could learn a lot about modern English from phrases like "cuz", "tho", "would of", "I red a book", etc..

Known sound changes. All Germanic languages went through a process of i-umlaut, where the presence of an /i/ changed the quality of the vowel in the previous syllable. In German its effects are most clear (hence the name), but it left its marks on English. For example, the plural of mouse being mice. The contemporary vowels for those words, /aʊ/ and /aɪ/, are not related by umlaut, but /u/ and /y/ (with the /y/ changing into /i/ later) would fit.

Loanwords into other languages. If we know something about the phonological history of another language, a centuries old loanword can tell us something about how a word was pronounced. The Finnish word for "ring" is "rengas", which gives a hint that it must have been pronounced with an /e/ 2500 years ago.

All these "hints" and more are combined by linguists, and for some languages this means we have a very high confidence of their earlier phonology. Especially for Middle English, with its vast documentation, many sister languages, well-understood origins, relative recency etc..

Thanks for the informative summary.

Another clue beyond those mentioned is misspellings: if you see a modern person write “should” as “shud” you know that the “l” is silent.

Well, a vowel shift isn't that unusual, with english however, and 17 vowels, the regularisation of the spelling never happened (and would be difficult now as folks would have to agree on one prestigious pronunciation to be the standard).

The pre-shift vowels are written and sound almost exactly the same as modern Dutch.

For anyone interested, there is some neat but not terribly well-known modeling work in cognitive science / phonology on chain shifts: http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/phonlab/documents/2007/op463...

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Cities_Vowel_Shift , a significant chain vowel shift that has been developing in some dialects of American English. It's detectable for example (though in a relatively mild form) in the speech of Hillary Clinton.

Wait, wait, wait. Does this article mean to tell me that cot and caught DON'T sound the same? Also stalk and stock?

Oh no, I've got it ]=

As a non-native speaker, I spent some time obsessing over the "correct" pronunciation of words, until I found this chart: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alpha...

Then I decided to just give up and adapt my pronunciation to that of whomever I'm speaking to.

As a native speaker, I grew up in an area where the boundaries of three American dialects were within about 25 miles, so I did the same. For example, it doesn't bother me at all to pronounce 'creek' as 'creek' or 'crick,' or 'wash' as 'wash' or 'warsh.' We all figured out where people in our little town came from by the way they pronounced a few different words. ('Roof' is another that tells something about you, for example.)

Most languages have regional differences in pronunciation, so being able to pick up on how the people you’re speaking to pronounce things is a really valuable skill for language in general.

As a native English speaker, I’ve always been quite good at learning to imitate accents (I can probably do about 10 or so different English-language accents), and I think it’s really helped when I’ve started learning other languages. I’ve been complimented for my pronunciation even early on (mainly using audio courses to start).

I’ve been reading a modern english translation of the Canterbury Tales, and once upon a time had to memorize the first part of the prologue in middle english. It’s nice to see some of the linguistic theory describing how the latter became the former.

PS give a ME translation of Canterbury Tales a try, it is super impressive.

> Great Vowel Shift is responsible for the fact that English spellings now often strongly deviate in their representation of English pronunciations.

Can someone explain this in simpler terms? I'm too tired to interpret this.

In layman's terms: people in England around ~1400/1500 started to change how vowels sounded in almost every word (i.e., /a/ shifted to /ei/, /i/ to /ai/, ..). Given that written languages often evolve much more slowly than their spoken form, people simply kept writing everything with its middle English spelling (which now had lots of wrongly placed vowels and mute consonants, such as [gh] and the [k] in "knight"), giving birth to the messy English spelling we all use and love.

This is also the reason why English speaking kids find spelling so difficult, and spelling bees exist - people are actually writing in an older version of the language they speak.

So "out" went from "oot" to "owt", "about" went from "aboot" to "abowt", eh? Thank God for traditionalist Canadians and Northumbrians.

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board

'Pirate dialect' was during the vowel shift according to linguist McWhorter. Longer vowels were replacing the earlier shorter German ones.

Which languages have fewer vowels than English?

For starters, Japanese has five [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology#Vowels

What about や (ya), ゆ (yu), よ (yo), わ (wa), ー (dash)?

Those are modifications of existing vowels, or diphthongs.

E.g. し(shi) + や(ya) = しゃ (sha), still the same 'a' sound.

English has only 5 vowel characters but more than 5 vowel sounds.

I mean the weak `i` in や. きや (ki-ya, as in sukiyaki) sounds different than きゃ (kya, as in "argh"), similar to how "meow" can be pronounced /miˈaʊ̯/ or /mjaʊ̯/

きゃ is not きや as in "kiya" but きゃ as in "kya" - the i in き becomes silent, きや would be something else. For example, 東京 isn't pronounced「とうきよう」but 「とうきょう」.

Right, Japanese has both /iˈ/ and /j/ sounds. Another example that happens outside the や column is イェス (yes).

this is just because of the shift of historical "ヱ" ("ye") getting pronounced as "エ" ("e") then just not used anymore. They're using "イ" as a semivowel here, /j/, not as the vowel /i/.

Oddly enough, it's been my observation that in きゃ and ぎゃ, the /a/ sound is considerably fronted compared to other syllables. It's usually realized as the central vowel [ä], but in these two, it's often fronted to [a]. This is why these syllables are used to render English words containing /kæ/ into Japanese, such as "cannon" (キャノン kyanon) or "cat" (キャット kyatto). Contrast with "cut" (カット katto) or "car" (カー kā).

Japanese has some interesting allophones. I also find the allophones in the Z-row fascinating as well ([z] and [d͡z] are allophones in free variation).

I think that /j/ sound is classified as a consonant, not a vowel

/j/ is a semivowel. Generally, these are classified and behave as consonants, but their vowel-like behavior still creeps in sometimes.

Really? That's weird. It's the same /j/ sound as in portuguese pai[1] (/paj/) and it's unequivocally a vowel there.

[1] https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/portuguese-engl...

Is it?

I just did a brief search, and found this paper [0], which includes a phonological inventory of Brazillian Portuguese. It lists /j/ as a consonant.

[0] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0023830902045002...

NB: I've finally addressed a request for clarification from a couple of weeks back:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16687856

Japanese de-voices vowels in certain contexts adjacent to voiceless consonants. The weakness you're describing is the lack of voicing (vocal cords vibrating).

The きや　きゃ (kiya, kya) distinction is not a phonological alternation. For instance, we have ぎゃく (gyaku), despite the fact that /g/ and /y/ are both voiced.

I'm aware of this, however he specifically mentioned a weak sound in "sukiyaki" which is due to de-voicing the /i/.

I believe the sound you identify as a weak `i` is the IPA sound /j/.

This is not an unreasonably connection to make. /j/ is the semivowel corresponding to /i/. Essentially, /j/ is what happens if you produce /i/ with just enough constriction that it no longer is classified as a vowel.

It is not apriori unreasonable to consider semivowels as vowels. However, linguistics has (mostly) reached the conclusion that semivowels are best characterized as consonants.

That's really interesting. Does that mean then that the i in words like pai and イェス is classified as a consonant? I've seen ヴ - a variation of ウ (u) to simulate v, but had never thought of i as a potential consonant.

I would need to hear a native speaker say them to be sure.

With my untrained ear, I have heard Japanese speakers use the diphthong /aɪ/ and the vowel sequence /a.i/ interchangeably. However, I suspect they are actually always pronouncing it as /a.i/, and I am just not good at distinguishing it.

I they were to try and pronounce pie using the closest approximation available with Japanese phonetics, I suspect they will settle on /pa.i/, in which case it is a real /i/.

If they were to pronounce it as /paj/, then Japanese photostatic would require adding a vowel at the end, likely giving us /paju/, which is not what we get.

イェス (yes) is a bit more difficult to predict. Japanese does have all of the sounds nessasary to pronounce /jɛs/ without modification. The syllable structure would require the addition of a vowel at the end, giving us /jɛsu/. However, as far as I am aware, Japanese does does have the /jɛ/ sequence for some reason. The question is, how bad is the /jɛ/ sequence to Japanese speakers? If it is just a historical artifact that /jɛ/ doesn't occur in Japanese, then they should have no problem pronouncing /jɛs/ as such, in which case the イ would be the consonant /j/. However is /jɛ/ is actually a bad sequence, then it would be changed into its closest approximation, which would be /i.ɛ/, in which case イ is the normal vowel /i/.

Based on the spelling (in particular the small ェ), they are at least trying to be faithful to the original English; as /i.ɛ/ has a perfectly normal spelling as イエ.

To take a simmilar example from English. Consider the name "Juan" (ʒɒn). English speakers can typically pronounce this, but it sounds foreign, because English does not allow /ʒ/ to occur in the begining of a word. If they were to pronounce it the English way, they would get "John" (ʤɒn).

Further, I suspect that the only reason English speakers can pronounce "Juan" so easily is exposure. I had a Brazilian Portuguese teacher (eg. a linguistics teacher whose native language is Brazilian Portuguese), whose name also begins with ʒ, but everyone pronounces it as "ʤ" and (it my experience), it was difficult to even understand what his name was until he pronounced it the with ʤ.

I’ve always thought of linguistics as a kind of human superpower. How much training have you had?

Just undergrad. I've also avoided phonology as much as possible, so I only have 1 semester of that. The only training in transcription was the phonetics section of the intro course (which consisted of only easy English transcriptions)

> However, as far as I am aware, Japanese does does have the /jɛ/ sequence for some reason.

I'm stretching a little bit, because I've looked into this in idle curiosity before.

The only connection I can think of is the brand "Ebisu", written "ヱビス", and sometimes romanized to "Yebisu". The character itself seems to be from a historical "we" kana, and I'm not sure of the reason for that.

Oh, and there's an archaic hiragana (but no katakana equivalent?) for "ye" (/jɛ/): 𛀁.

> English has only 5 vowel characters but more than 5 vowel sounds.

So what are we counting here? The sounds or the characters we use to represent the sounds? Because if you go by sounds, I think Dutch has more than 14.

(a, aa, o, oo, e, è, ee, u, uu, i, ie, eu, ui, au, ij, oe)

I've heard that in Czech, the 'r' can be a vowel. In a name like Brno, for example. Those are apparently two syllables. (I don't speak Czech, so no idea if it's true.)

Spanish has five. Period. No exceptions. And crystal clear.

1. You deserve my downvote for claiming “no exceptions” in a linguistic matter.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_phonology#Exact_number...

    There is no agreement among scholars on how many vowel
    allophones Spanish has.

Frontera tour link:

> According to Eugenio Martínez Celdrán, however, systematic classification of Spanish allophones is impossible due to the fact that their occurrence varies from speaker to speaker and from region to region. According to him, the exact degree of openness of Spanish vowels depends not so much on the phonetic environment, but rather on various external factors accompanying speech.

So parent point stands. That's my opinion as well as a Spaniard.

"no exceptions" sounds like the focus is on rules, in particular on orthography (correct writing). It's easy to ban exceptions if you make the rules. This is the realm of prescriptive linguistics.

The very fact that there are individuals and whole group of people who actually talk differently can, has been, and still often is dismissed as either ignorance, class, personal idiosincrasies, ...

There is a different way at looking at the thing: observing it objectively as other things in nature. This descriptive linguistics is endlessly fascinating to me, as it's less infected by human desires that have nothing to do with linguistics and all to do with politics.

An example of where those two viewpoints begin to present reality in a quite different way and yet don't require to be a trained linguist to grasp it is the definition of where a dialect ends and a language begins.

Allophones are not a great thing to cite in a dispute over how many vowels a language has. Unless you know you're in a context where people are talking about allophones specifically, no one will care.

Well, except for the 14 diphthongs and the fact that /e/ and /o/ are more like /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ in certain closed syllables. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_phonology#Vowels

Those diphthongs have the same sound as combining the sounds of the two letters used to spell them, though.

The sounds may be similar, but they are not identical. Diphthongs are considered to be single segments phonologically, and some pronunciation changes can occur in "blending" the component parts together.

But I'm not sure I would go so far as to say all of the diphthongs should be counted as separate "vowels" in the language.

Off the top of my head, most romance languages. You could argue some German dialects as well, Japanese, etc.

Maybe even Chinese depending on your definition of 'vowel'. Are you talking phonemes or actual phones?

English has ~17 vowels, which isn't the most a language has, but that's quite a few

Tagalog/Filipino (the national language of the Philippines) has 5, very similar pronunciation to vowels in Spanish.

Pretty much all of them. http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2010/11/vowel-inventories.... says that the average number of vowels in a language is just below 6, and "large" vowel inventories are of size 7-14.

English is on the heavier side of vowels, although much of it is diphthongs.

The "standard" vowel system is 5 basic vowels (vaguely an a, e, i, o, u, although not as English tends to pronounce those), although some languages (e.g., most American languages) have only 3 or 4. Many languages have a few more monophthongs. English has an additional mid a/e sound, an additional i sound, and another few more u's. There's also the unstressed vowel (aka schwa), and a couple of diphthongs.

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