I think the jury's still out as to whether there's been more than one vowel shift in English, or whether the vowel shift just never stopped happening. Certainly it "stopped" (for all practical purposes) later in some places than others (see Paikeday's comments about Canadian English and vowel shifting, for instance -- Google search "Canadian Raising" for starters!). So it's not impossible that the same word could have the "u" sound as in "dumb" in 900 and then the "u" sound as in "zucchini" by 1200 or 1300. (Tell me that people sounded the same in 1700 as they do now!)
We're already seeing a split between more and less highly-shifted variants of MdnE, some of them severe enough to require "dialect" classification. Ask me about that guy who answered the phone "Haamaa Payp Cupneh," sometime. He was trying to say "Hyman Paper Company," but between his consonant loss and (lack of) vowel shift, neither of us could understand practically Word One of what the other said.
I don't read German, either, but then again, I think German looks enough like English that I can figure out the simple words. German and English are sort of cousin languages, which means that English belongs to a family full of dotty relatives (on both sides) -- English is one of the dottiest.
The Great Vowel Shift and Friends
We're already seeing a split between more and less highly-shifted variants of MdnE, some of them severe enough to require "dialect" classification. Ask me about that guy who answered the phone "Haamaa Payp Cupneh," sometime. He was trying to say "Hyman Paper Company," but between his consonant loss and (lack of) vowel shift, neither of us could understand practically Word One of what the other said.
I don't read German, either, but then again, I think German looks enough like English that I can figure out the simple words. German and English are sort of cousin languages, which means that English belongs to a family full of dotty relatives (on both sides) -- English is one of the dottiest.