Chain shift

Okay kiddo, so chain shift is like a game we can play with words. Imagine we have three toys - a ball, a car, and a truck. And we want to move them so that the car is in the middle.

Now let's pretend that words are the toys, and instead of moving them around physically, we are going to change the way we say them.

So, we start with the word "cat." It has a "k" sound at the beginning. We want to move that sound to the end of the word, so we change "cat" to "ackt."

Now let's move the "t" sound to the beginning of the word. So, we change "ackt" to "tack."

Finally, let's move the "k" sound from the end of the word to the beginning. We change "tack" to "katt."

Did you notice how we moved the sounds around and ended up with a different word? That's what chain shift is. It's a way of changing the way words sound by shifting the sounds around in a specific order.

Linguists study chain shift to better understand how languages change over time. Isn't that cool?