1613: The Great Vowel Shift: canaan May 15, 2019

The English pronunciation of 'Canaan' is relatively closer to the Hebrew form כנען (knʿn) where it is derived compared to the later Greek synonym 'Phoenicia', but it is still quite different. First, Semitic languages have their stress later in the word than in Germanic languages usually, but earlier English pronunciations of Canaan used to be closer to the original. During the Great Vowel Shift, which moved English from Middle English to Modern English the [aː] sound—which is the same as in 'hat' in Standard British English became [eɪ] as in the first syllable of 'Canaan', but this is further from the physiologically central [ə] in Hebrew. So, when it was a just loanword from Latin and earlier Greek, the name was closer to how it originally was, as Hebrew and other Semitic languages can replace any unstressed vowel with a [ə] or something close.