If there’s one thing life has taught me, it’s that high school literature teachers love convincing you that Middle English is close enough to Modern English for you to stumble along without a translation through Chaucer’s prologue, and I’m here to tell you that is some nonsense and you don’t have to stand for it. Also, I think that mutually intelligible conversation Eddie Izzard pulled off with that Frisian farmer or whatever was 100% staged, and it’s weird to pretend that Appalachian English is some sort of perfectly preserved bubble of Elizabethan speech. Anyhow, Middle English is stupid hard and it’s impossible to guess what it means, so stop making me feel stupid by suggesting I should just be able to guess what gypon means. Look at this gibberish:
WHAN that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
When that April with his sooty showers??
The drought of March hath pierced to the root, ok fine that one was a gimme
And bathed every vein in switch licorice,
Of which virtue engendered is the flower
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
When the Zephyr…ekes?? with his sweet breath
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth, how can you inspire hath
The tender crops, and the young sun
okay see the individual words translate maybe 70% of the time but you need a translator to PULL MEANING OUT OF THESE ENGENDERED LICORICE HOLTS
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open ye,
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages:
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And small birds make melody
That sleep all night with open eyes
So pricks hem nature in her courages (WHAT)
Then people long to go on pilgrimages (WAIT WHY THOUGH? “BIRDS ARE AWAKE AT NIGHT SO I’D BETTER LEAVE TOWN?”)
And palmers for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
And palmers for to seek strange…stronds
To ferne halwes, couthe in sundry lands (THE FUCK)
And specially, from every shire’s end
of England, to Cantebury they wend (I’M NOT STUPID, THIS IS EXTREMELY A DIFFERENT LANGUAGE)
The holy blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.
Bifel that, in that sesoun on a day,
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
The holy blissful martyr for to seek
That he would help, when they were seeking him??
Bifel that, in that season on a day
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
BIFEL THIS
Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At night was come in-to that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye,
Ready to wend on my pilgrimage
To Canterbury with full, devout courage
At night I came to that hostelry
With nine and twenty people in a company (are they with him? Are they just there at the hostel already? SURE WOULD BE HELPFUL TO HAVE A TRANSLATOR)
Of sondry folk, by aventure y-falle
In felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde;
The chambres and the stables weren wyde,
Of sundry folk, by adventure…they fell??
In fellowship, and pilgrims were they all
That toward Canterbury they…would??? ride;
The chambers and the stables were wyde (okay I guess)
And wel we weren esed atte beste.
And shortly, whan the sonne was to reste,
So hadde I spoken with hem everichon,
That I was of hir felawshipe anon,
And well we were even at best
And shortly when the son was resting
So had I spoken with hem everybody (???)
That I was of her fellowship anon
And made forward erly for to ryse,
To take our wey, ther as I yow devyse.
But natheles, whyl I have tyme and space,
Er that I ferther in this tale pace,
And made forward early for to rise
To take our way, there as I yow devise
But nonetheless, while I have time and space
Ere that I further in this tale pace
mmm, I went to bed, something devices, but I have time and space so I’m going to talk first?? is that what this section says?
Me thinketh it acordaunt to resoun,
To telle yew al the condicioun
Of ech of hem, so as it semed me,
And whiche they weren, and of what degree;
And eek in what array that they were inne:
And at a knight than wol I first biginne.
I think it according to reason
To tell you all the condicion
Of each of them, oh shit is “hem” them?? SORTED, as it seemed to me
And which they were, and of what degree,
And…eke…in what array that they were in
And at a knight then will I first begin.
fuck middle English
I spent my day today translating the Wife of Bath’s Tale, so Mallory continues to be 100% relevant to my life at all times. It’s starting to get creepy (but remains fantastic)
It gets worse: I had to memorize this in high school. In Middle English. I didn’t do a good job of it. 0/10 do not recommend.
Noooo memorizing this prologue is the best! I did it my freshman year in college and can still rattle it off pretty well.
Me too! In high school. I just sat here and rattled off up to “whan that they were sicke.”
… Did we go to the same high school? Because I did, too, and I still remember it 20 years later, but only because I focused the sounds and the cadence of the gibberish words, like trying to memorize and recite Jabberwocky.
Oh – I can do THAT! but not this…
I did not ever have to memorize Chaucer, but I did have to memorize Jabberwocky. And I can still do the whole thing twenty-something years later. (Oh hell, it’s almost thirty years later, whaaat?)
Jabberwockifiers unite! But I can only remember all the words if I sing it (thank you, choir brain).
Be still! I had to memorize it in 10th grade, and it’s my bestest party trick. Seriously, when I whip that shit out, I am the Queen of the Party (and it’s probably time to either go home or dance).
Can I go to the parties you go to? We could recite in unison…
it was my school’s tradition to have all 10th graders memorize the prologue (in the Middle English) and then perform it for the entire school. It was a mess–most people didn’t know the lines apart from the “pilgrimages” and “to Canterbury they wende”, so it was unintelligible mumbling and then yelling those two lines as loud as they could. Fun, though!
Reminds me of when my second-grade class did Deck the Halls for a Christmas recital. Deck the something mumble mumble FA LA LA LA LAAAAH LA LA LAH LAAAAH. Like yelling the fa la la’s made up for not knowing the other lines.
My mother claims I sang “Go Tell It on the Mountain” that way in second grade choir. Apparently she could hear me yelling, “Gooooooo tell it on the Mooooooountain!” in each chorus but literally nothing else.
Pulling this out of your back pocket was a good way to get a slight grade boost in medieval-related classes in college.
All of you who still remember this are my people, and I would definitely want to help you when you’re sick.
ME TOO! Seriously, I never quite got the point of grading us on how well we could recite the Prologue with a vaguely Middle English accent. But I still remember it all to this day, so that’s something, I guess.
ME TOO. Although only the first 18 lines. These days I can generally only remember up to “of which vertu engendred is the flour”.
Me tooooo! It was so hilarious when we would all recite it together. I know it’s a different language but NOT BY MUCH so it just sounded like a bunch of 14 year olds trying to cast a weird spell.
I still get mildly irritated when I think about that one episode of The West Wing where Bartlett calls a high-school English teacher for some reason and, in the course of the conversation, hassles her about teaching Beowulf in translation instead of “the original middle English.” BEOWULF, fyr Goddes seke.
“The original middle English.”
Don’t mind me, I’m just over here, twitching.
Possibility: the writer knew perfectly well that was wrong, and was including it as Bartlett winkingly checking to see if the teacher would pick up on it.
Second possibility: the writer included this as an example of Bartlett being Old and therefore having Wrong Opinions Sometimes.
Third possiblity: the writer was an idiot who has the amorphous idea that Teaching In The Original is correct.
(googles)
From the Wikia:
In the course of this plot line, President Jed Bartlet, an erudite Nobel Prize winner (but not in literature), refers to the great epic “Beowulf” as a classic of Middle English.
Zounds! It’s in Old English, and didn’t the e-mails make that clear! Will there be a script with a Beowulf makeup test?
[…]
Aaron Sorkin, creator of this prime-time administration, responded, “Ic agan nic answaru”–in Old English, roughly: “no comment.”
That is the best possible response on the subject from Aaron.
This anecdote really needs to specify if this interaction was by email, so he had time to look it up, or if someone asked Sorkin this in person and he had that ready.
Ða wæs on burgum Beowulf Scyldinga,
leof leodcyning, longe þrage
folcum gefræge (fæder ellor hwearf,
aldor of earde), oþþæt him eft onwoc
heah Healfdene; heold þenden lifde,
gamol ond guðreouw, glæde Scyldingas.
ðæm feower bearn forð gerimed
I’ll get right on that, man who fathered Charlie Sheen.
This comment made my day.
I’ll get right on that, man who fathered Charlie Sheen.
My new go-to “no way in hell”.
That is clearly:
Dad was on burgers scolding Beowulf,
lead-signing a leaf along Prague
fuck that refrigerator (father is Wharf,
alder of the eared), o pat him often on walks
here Half-dean; hold the lift then,
gamble and good row, glad scoldings.
Damn fewer bears Ford grimed.
FUCK that refrigerator. It knows what it did.
o pat him often on walks:
a dog’s tale
“GLAD SCOLDINGS” omg yes!
What a better and also more accurate “season’s greetings” card could there be?!
He’s also the least sympathetic character on Grace and Frankie, so,
wynungen!
Þæt wæs god cyning!
The smidges of Old English I still sometimes have in my head are Alfred’s translation of the Lord’s prayer– “Urne gedæġhwamlican hlaf sele us todæġ”– and Caedmon’s hymn– “He ærest sceop / eorþan bearnum // heofon to hrofe, / halig Scyppend.” Because I was one of two students taking Old English in college, and my slacker ex couldn’t be arsed to care, I got to pick what was going to be on the final, which meant there was some Bede.
I am never getting those brain cells back.
I make it a point to have a ball of socks at the ready when I watch that episode, primed to throw at the screen at the proper time.
Hwaetever, Bartlett!
For some reason*, this bothers me more than many of the more egregious sins committed by TWW.
*pedantry
My pedantic beef is when Bartlet makes a snide remark to Charlie about not reading about ecology as written by Ernst Haeckel. Which he pronounces High-kell.
1. Haeckel didn’t use the term “ecology” to mean what Bartlet thinks it means; and 2. it’s pronounced “heckle.” As in, I would totally heckle Sorkin for not knowing what the hell he’s writing about.
(My second biggest pedantic beef has to do with the episode where Toby yells about a lettuce geneticist in Salinas, CA, but I’ll save that rant for another time.)
This is the inevitable consequence of non-geniuses writing genius characters.
It me, except trying to explain to people why knowing ancient Greek (attic, 5th century) doesn’t help me when we’re at the local Greek Festival. (my prof’s favorite example from college: the word in Attic Greek that means “to be a slave” means “to have a job” in modern Greek)
That seems like a pretty legit evolution, considering both Ancient Greek ideas about having jobs and the modern reality that jobs are terrible.
Excellent rebuttal. My own preferred example: ‘metaphor’ in modern Greek now means ‘truck’
Srsly. I visited a friend doing a fellowship in Athens years ago and saw a truck labeled metaphores, and had to take a photo for my poetry students.
We had a great conversation about what transports us.
The one that winds me up is the English (Americanism?) “doula”. It means slave! Why are you using it! Yes, I know words evolve, but we already had the word “midwife”! And when that crazy sister of Luke’s named her child that on Gilmore Girls (shudder).
Same diff, tho, amirite?
No joke, lost my heart to Professor Stratagem when he recited this with full inflection on our third date. Dead language, don’t know if I was being had.
And then lost it again to Apu when he sang “such a bewitching flOOOzy” in A Streetcar Named Marge.
Total slut for emphatic /oo/
Oh what’s a paperboy to dooooo?
O Floooozie, that’s a Q I ask yoooooouuu
I legit changed my minor in college and dropped the class when our Brit Lit professor tried to force this on us. No thanks.
If you can technically puzzle out the surface meaning of a passage but only with a lot of flailing and “wtf the fuck”s and leaving shit untranslated, YOU DO NOT KNOW THAT LANGUAGE, I don’t give a shit what percent of words we share. If I told you I spoke Spanish and tried to pass off something like the above as a translation of Don Quijote, you would say I couldn’t fucking speak Spanish.
Ha! I was thinking that this solidly resembles my understanding of my inlaws conversations in Spanish.
It’s like modern English is like speaking Middle English at an Advanced Intermediate level for a long time.
Sorry not sorry,teens. It’s the only way to get you to stop telling me you can’t understand Shakespeare because it’s “old English”. Lucky I didn’t make you do Beowulf.
Oh, Mallory. I love you so.
i want to apologize to everyone i’ve ever met at a party, because i like to recite this with no provocation basically any time i’m even the slightest bit drunk
also I think the bird lines are like a sex joke?
THANK YOU. Me too. I try to rotate it to different friends, but I think I’ve recited it to everyone I know after two glasses of wine. My backup is Jabberwocky.
I like to see how few breaths I can use for Jabberwocky. Voice lessons have definitely helped me win this party trick.
I got as far as “burbled” mumbling to myself with no breaths just now.
I got to “sought,” but I’ve been doing yardwork, and I spoke with some inflection and pauses.
You know you can sing Jabberwoky to the tune of Greensleeves right?
whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat
Wow… well, I’ll be. That’s quite something. My day just got a little more interesting.
I can do the entire first verse of “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” in one breath thanks to an acting elective that (proved useless except that it) emphasized enunciation.
Yep. Nightingales have no time for sleeping, too busy sexing.
It’s Chaucer. Of course the bird lines are a sex joke.
There’s a lot of filth in Chaucer.
Sex joke always a safe bet with Chaucer. Birds are gettin’ frisky and people… want to go on pilgrimage. You KNOW that was not how that was supposed to end.
The Wife of Bath goes on pilgrimages to look for husbands. Seems legit!
It’s fascinating to look at because you can see how the language is evolving. If you compare this to Shakespeare to Austin to Paretsky, you’ll understand that language changes and you won’t get so upset over text speak. Emojis, on the other hand. Dang it, leave hieroglyphs in the past where they belong.
But hieroglyphs are so EXPRESSIVE, they have FACES, I can anthropomorphize them, can’t do that with silly words, now can I? (plot twist: I can)
Emojis are already demonstrating linguistic evolution, vide the eggplant + raindrops = sexytimes. I mean, the youth today are awful, but also they are fascinating. To paraphrase William Gibson, it’s like being a bored social science researcher with one finger permanently on the fast-forward button.
I work for a famous university press that last year made an emoji (😂) our Word of the Year, to much wailing and gnashing of teeth (including mine at the time), but I think it’s legitimately fascinating how all this stuff* is changing language and written communication (hashtags, emojis, lolcats, memes, gifs and so on).
*Stuff is a technical linguistic term, of course.
The interesting thing about emojis is that normally with a language, you have sounds, then you attach the sounds to a meaning, and then you have some kind of symbol for those sounds, ie writing. With emojis you have symbols, and then a meaning is created for it, and no sounds at all. It’s a sort of inverse of normal language development.
I like Mesoamerican glyphs for the wide range of facial expressions they include.
I was at a wedding reception a few weeks ago, and the teenage girl I was talking to actually said “hashtag [stuff]” in conversation. It was AMAZING.
*whispers* I have actually said that.
I mean, I do that too, but teenagers can do it un-self-consciously, whereas I feel kind of weird and awkward when I do it in front of non-internet people.
Okay but when has a teenager ever done anything un-self-conisouly?
Oh man, I do that all the time. I always wonder like three seconds afterwards when a Real Adult TM is going to call me up on being a douchebag millenial, but it just expresses something very specific, I refuse to stop.
hashtag I regret nothing
Just find out what generation they are and repeat that generation’s slang back to them. It’s, like, groovy and bodacious, daddy-o. #23skidoo.
The trouble with this is that I also use hideously outdated slang unironically due to my parents using it around me a lot from a young age.
The word “groovy” especially. Thankfully it just gives me ironic hipster cred these days.
The guy that sits next to me at work (25) says that A LOT but he also has a beard, a fixie and really strong opinions about coffee, so I think he’s just a hipster.
The last guy I went on a date with (30) also constantly peppered the conversation with ‘hashtag nailed it!’. There wasn’t a second date, but for unrelated reasons.
I definitely throw “hashtag confirmed” into conversations more than I probably should.
She was full of confidence and moxie and righteous zeal, and I pretty much wanted to high-five her constantly.
I memorized the first 14 lines of this in college because I mistakenly thought that was the assignment. When I got to the professor’s office hours to do my recitation, he said, “Oh, you memorized it?” Turns out we just had to demonstrate that we could read the IPA correctly. Which I could have done on the first day of class.
I totally had to puzzle it out, although the teacher did help us, and we pretty much got the first couple of pages or so… But when I did finally pick up a version with a translation, one phrase I had gotten completely wrong was “ferne halwes.” I totally saw those pilgrims tromping single file through the woods with gigantic ferns on either side of them that rose over their heads and met and if you could, wouldn’t you want to walk down a “ferny hallway” too!?
I had to look it up too now. Means “distant shrines”, so I was half right!
I recognized “fern” because that is also the German word for “distant”. I guess “halwes” would be related to the modern word “hallows”??? Blegh. I’m totally with Mallory on this one.
Bifel that, indeed.
BIRDS ARE AWAKE AT NIGHT SO I’D BETTER LEAVE TOWN?”
That’s all the reason I would need. Birds are menacing as fuck.
One of my college professors explained those two lines as “the birds are up doin’ it all night instead of sleeping.” And i was like, hell yeah, I’m gonna be maken melodye all weekend.
See, it’s quite possible to read it “untranslated” – if half the page is taken over by footnotes indicating every word that’s changed meaning or no longer used. (Which is how I did it in college.) Without any help at all? Phfft fuck that.
“BIRDS ARE AWAKE AT NIGHT SO I’D BETTER LEAVE TOWN?”
seems 100% legit
Also, while I’m here, the idea that Appalachian English is pure pristine Elizabethan speech exactly the way Shakespeare knew it is the biggest load of balls I’ve heard today. Life does not work that way. It does, I’m sure preserve certain features from them that other American dialects don’t, but then it’ll also have innovated in directions where the others didn’t. That’s how humans do.
When my great-grandfather emigrated to the United States, he brought with him a small bubble of German dialect that was unchanged* from when most of his village fled to Czechoslovakia in 18mumbledywhatsit.
*except, of course, that they had decided that grammatical gender was stupid, and so all nouns took the feminine article. Other than that, totally the same. Oh, and they simplified the subjunctive
Man, that feminine article thing would have made my high school German learning so much easier.
“Fuck this, everything’s die now. Who even came up with this? It’s a table, people!”
This is only somewhat related, but the thing I found least convincing in the second part of Seveneves (SPOILERS) is the idea that groups of people who have been completely separated for 5000 years would have any ability whatsoever to understand each other.
I have that book in my pile to read for the Hugo ballot and I am not looking forward to it because Stephenson never shuts up and gets on with it.
I generally like Stephenson – I’d rank the Baroque Cycle in my top ten (it has its flaws, sure, but the combination of history, science, and adventure gets me right where I live) – but I found the second part of that book to be supremely frustrating, and one particular plot point just pissed me off completely.
David and Ben Crystal, a linguist father/actor son team in Britain, analyzed everything Shakespeare wrote for “okay this is clearly supposed to rhyme” and such and then reverse-engineered an “Original Pronunciation” dialect from there; it sounds suuuper mish-moshy Irish-Appalachian-Pirate-American-British and not like any one thing at all. What I love about it though is that they’re always really clear that they definitely do NOT claim that OP is what everyone in Elizabethan London actually sounded like; it’s just what they figured out is the best accent to perform this particular canon in for maximum original punnage/rhyming/dick jokes. I got to meet Ben a couple years ago and he said if they had picked a different playwright from the same period (unlikely, since Ben at least is the single most passionately single-minded adorable darling Shakespeare theater nerd ever) but if they had, they would probably have ended up with a different sound. WE CANNOT TRULY KNOW THE PAST *woowoo spirit arms*
Birds are often awake at night at my apartment complex because I think they’re confused by the streetlights so I totally get it. When my sanity finally snaps it will be the fault of those monsters and I’d book it out of this place in a second if I could.
Noooo! I’m sorry. I like to think of myself as a nature lover, but whenever some chipper fuck of a bird starts chirping away too early I go absolutely bonkers. GO TO SLEEP, BIRDS
I remember 0% of the whole entire course I had to take on this in uni, and I’m GLAD OF IT. Wouldn’t want it taking up important brain space I need to remember radio advert jingles from the late 90’s!
On my deathbed I won’t remember my own name but I will remember the first 18 lines of this prologue. On the bright side a few years ago I discovered that it’s pretty fun to sing them to the tune of “Umbrella.”
You can also sing “Because I could not stop for death” to the tune of the Pokemon opening theme song.
Also to the Gilligans Island theme song!
And the Yellow Rose of Texas!
GAH.
(That means you can probably sing the rest of her poems to it as well, since you can sing them all to The Yellow Rose of Texas, which was the song I already knew about.)
I actually understand most of it but I majored in English and then did graduate work in it as well.
The normal person, not so much.
oh my GOD I have sung ceremony of carols twice and there is one movement that we DO NOT KNOW what the fuck we are saying. ever.
The knees of me hert sall I bow!
MY SOLO
which I learned the second time is supposed to be pronounced like sall-ee-bow which I am always like sally bowles!! M’DAMES ET M’SSEURS.
Nice! I love that song. But yeah, there were so many words in that cycle that seem normal when written and then we were told how to pronounce them and went, WTF? That’s… not what I would have thought.
Now I’m trying to figure out which movement is the most confusing, but am totally failing. “I singe of a maiden that is makeles”? “Adam lay ybunden”? The movement that sounds like a broken record?
When I was in labor recently the nurse told me she had had to memorize the first 18 lines of the General Prologue in high school (I had mentioned doing a degree in medieval literature). She then recited them with me between contractions. She was the best nurse!
OMG I so gave birth in the wrong hospital.
I have a degree which was, in part, supposed to teach me both Old and Midle English, so I take personal offence at this. (The fact that I have forgotten a lot of it – and, you know, couldn’t really read it at the time – does not make me any less cross.)
Middle English is tricky to read at sight, but compared to Old English it is a thing of beauty. (Except for the bloody Pearl-poet and their stupid West Midlands dialect that is not that similar to Modern English.) And Early Modern English is a breeze. (Someone posted on the Old English Facebook group the other day confused that Beowulf was not in Shakespearian language. They were quickly informed that Shakespeare might have written in “old English”, but he definitely did not write in “Old English”.)
But so many fun yoghs and thorns in the West Midlands dialect! And weird Germanic words that should totally be brought back into the language!
And the problem with reading Middle English in translation is simply that it sounds fucking stupid.
I much prefer the word “þusternesse” to “darkness” and am seriously bummed that it fell out of the English language.
West Midlands, ILU, but wtf are you even doing? I see you with your secret Viking words, stop that.
All I am going to say is, Norn. (Old Norse – scots hybrid.)
Goddamnit, I am going to miss The Toast.
I have a degree in Literature. We had to do the untranslated Full Canterbury Tales in undergrad. THEN in grad school we went on to the untranslated if you please Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and I looooooonged for the simplicity of Chaucer and his fart jokes and double entendres. Luckily my Arthurian class professor was more interested in proving that he could pronounce Beowulf than in making us do so, and the only other class where we covered that particular work was a history class using the Seamus Heaney translation, which is truly a thing of immense and glorious (modern English) beauty.
All said, Chaucerian English is easier than the stuff that came before it, in that you will recognize more of it without feeling like you suddenly lapsed into reading Danish. However. It is still pretty much another language for all intents and purposes. It’s not until I get into Elizabethan/Shakespearean texts that I start feeling like I’m reading something I can understand more as a native tongue and less as something I studied for a couple of semesters in high school and college and kind of get on an intellectual level but could really only reliably find my way to the bathroom with.
And. I’m from Kentucky. Our Appalachian speakers have very interesting accents, and I haven’t the first clue what Elizabethans might have sounded like back in the day, but they must have sounded pretty twangy backwoods to sound anything like what our people sound like now. I think the gist of those original studies is that some of our idioms held over, which I’ll believe. But Kentucky by and large (which I realize is only a small part of Appalachia as a whole), is more Scots-Irish than English in ancestry, and if you don’t believe there’s much of a difference, I’d advise you not to make that known to the folks out this way.
Ha! My kin are from the NC mountains and they are similarly fierce about the Scots-Irish. Funny, because it’s basically like “We were the proud cattle-raiding hicks of the British Isles, and we’ll be the hicks of America!”
You’ve got it about right on the Appalachian thing, at least as it was explained to me in my linguistic variation classes- it’s thought that it contains certain features from those times *less* changed than any still-used accents and dialects, and the features that haven’t changed as much are different to the features in other extant uses of English which haven’t changed much. It is CERTAINLY not “Elizabethan English”. I mean, we’ve made attempts to reconstruct accents in Shakespearean London particularly (for use in Original Pronunciation productions of his plays, it’s very cool) and they sound more like Yorkshire and maybe some Black Country English accents to me.
I think the idea has to do with rhoticity–the notion being that early British settlers in America pronounced the “r”s after vowels, but doing that went increasingly out of fashion in prestige British dialects in the following centuries. I believe this is still considered at least partially accurate, but it’s not the same as saying that Appalachian dialects sound exactly like Shakespeare.
When I taught Latin, I was told by students in the region that some of my examples of the subjunctive that aren’t used so much anymore were, in fact, what they’d be comfortable hearing and saying. And we use the subjunctive more than the Brits.
Side note: ask me about all your was/were problems! Bonus wolden if you act now!
I LOVE the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf! It’s just so gorgeous…
Okay, I’m not gonna lie. This was… strangely easy to read and understand. It helps to sound out the words instead of looking at the weird spelling and deciding it can’t mean anything. Or maybe I’m just good at words?
Nope, that’s pretty much it! Shake off the chains of post 1500 standardized spelling and you’re mostly good to go.
Oh, good. Granted, I’m much better at Old French than I am at Middle English, but reading Chaucer the words seem to make sense – I just remind myself to sound it out.
Old French is definitely easier. It is much more similar to modern French than Middle English is to Modern English. And you can see the influence of French (or, I mean, Norman dialect but close enough) on Middle-and-onwards English in the words that we’ve kept but have disappeared from French.
Exactly! It helps that I’m fluent in modern French. Also, I was a bookish, word-obsessed child who wondered why there were words like inject, project, reject, dejected, conjecture, etc. but not ‘ject’ itself, and scoured dictionaries learning about Greek and Latin roots… and Old French is, as my favorite English Lit professor says, “basically just collapsed Latin.”
Have you read “The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks?” Her discussion of “disgruntled” vs. “gruntled” (and other such) made my word-self very happy.
And let us take a moment to recall the great Ten Things I Hate About You:
“I know you can be overwhelmed, and you can be underwhelmed, but can you ever be just whelmed?”
“I think you can in Europe.”
Thiiiiiis. I muttered my way through the Riverside Chaucer both in undergrad and then again in grad school. Turns out my Middle English accent is more than a little bit southern-USish, while I personally am not.
YES. My Middle English accent is an unholy blend of southern-US-ish and Irish-ish. I am neither of those things, but, hey, it got me through three English degrees.
Yup. My Middle English accent turned out kind of Irish, which is funny b/c my ancestry is mostly Scots-Irish but that’s several generations back.
**Adds “Bifel THIS” to Notebook of Swears.**
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I did not have to read Chaucer untranslated, but I remember one of my English professors reading Middle English in his Minnesota accent – it sounded lovely but clearly not like English.
NGL – my favorite part of reading Chaucer in high school was the dirty jokes.
Fave Grad School Prof (a medievalist) thought it was hilarious to hear me read Middle English, because I sounded like the Swedish chef.
I think that’s everyone’s favourite bit of Chaucer, including Chaucer’s.
What a coincidence, I am forcing myself to read original language Chaucer this year! (With copious notes and help to hand, obviously, I’m not that smart.) For no other reason than bragging rights and a stubborn sense of “I’m a linguist, I ought to be able to apply that somehow”.
Every single person I’ve talked to about this has tried to talk me out of it, so that’s always a good sign.
Oh God. Memory surge! My high school English teacher made us all memorize this. Which wasn’t all that useful in life, true, but was 80% more useful than all his other “work” for us. Like when we listened to and analyzed James Taylor songs, or when he showed us pictures of fancy houses. Or when we would read the NYT restaurant reviews for SAT vocab prep. Or when we would do the crossword.
Said teacher also acted out the tree part of Superstar for us (the doorframe played Tree, with great aplomb) and once danced on the classroom sink. (Why was there a sink, you ask? We don’t know, except for him to brush his teeth at when he would finish a smoke break.)
Please note that this was the only teacher at my school with a PhD, and BOY did he mind if you forgot to call him “Dr”.
Was your high school English teacher from the same school of thought as mine? Mine made us study all the lyrics of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”. The entire album. He was on a real loneliness theme that whole semester on account of how his latest girlfriend had dumped him.
I had another HS literature teacher who would make us all stand around with dixie cups of water practicing “literary cocktail chitchat”, which he felt would be essential in our adult lives. And we had to dress up in character to give our oral reports on various readings.
Chaucer takes me right back to college…dark out, late afternoon, very Chaucerian bearded professor. And I’m thinking…I quit biology as a major bc of chemistry and physics…and now THIS? I would appreciate my education so much more now.
My required undergrad Chaucer class was at 8:30am and the professor just read to us. We called it Storytime with Chris Carroll and it was better than you’d imagine. My elective grad Chaucer class was at a reasonable hour and was the single filthiest course I have ever taken and also better than you’d imagine.
Catullus was the single filthiest course I’ve ever taken, and it was also fantastic.
That’s what Catullus is for!
I read Chaucer untranslated just for fun in junior high, as summer reading. I got terrible headaches every two hours (for some strange reason) but it was great to read dick jokes while on camping trips with my dad’s church friends, while they had no idea and I just looked so studious. Also I got to be SUPERIOR to my friends and so on when school started again. They were all very impressed (they really were; I was lucky enough to go to a school full to the eyeballs with angry, pedantic, pretentious intellectual teens scoring well into the 95th percentile, even the football players, so I got mad street cred for it. Tre impressive
Every summer now I repeat the procedure, since it was so successful the first time. I generally don’t get terribly far, but it’s very fun. Imagine my delight when I found the works of Marie de France! Even lighter reading (since it has to be translated, since I don’t know any French, let alone Middle French), and you don’t have to compromise the dick jokes! Great stuff. I’d like to dig into other, more fairy-centric Middle English works, if I can. But I mean, Idk. Middle English + dick jokes + headaches = Summer (TM) for me
The Old French Marie de France writes in is pretty much collapsed Latin, so if you know any Latin at all you could give it a try. All the English translations of her rhymed octets that I’ve seen have been just a little too cutesy for me…
Old French, not Mid French! My mistake. Uh, afraid I don’t know any latin, no. But it was very kind and generous of you to think I do! If ever I do learn it, or French, I shall certainly give it a whack.
English translations of her rhymed octets? I’m afraid the only version I’m familiar with made it all into prose rather than the original poetry format, which I’ve only just now realized is probably weird, and that I really ought to find a copy still in that format, to compare. I don’t recall anything cutesy going on in terms of phrasing in my Penguin Classics version, translated by Glyn Burgess & Keith Busby (1986 edition, not the slightly different, more common late 90s edition), but I mean, I haven’t reread it since last year, so my memory is probably fairly unreliable here.
You’re lucky to have read a prose translation! Those carry the meaning so much better than the ones that tried to stick to the original rhyme scheme – French octets just don’t come out right in English. Though I am by no means an expert, I’ve studied Marie de France in both French AND English Lit, so I can at least offer a decently-backed-up opinion. I’m always glad to run into someone else who is delighted by Marie de France’s works – I just love her.
Oh! Well uh, good then. I’m glad I’ve read a better English translation, in that case. Oh I just adore them! And her sassiness when she introduces herself, and calls out her haters!! I just!!!
“Hear, my lords, the words of Marie, who, when she has the opportunity, does not SQUANDER her talents. Those who gain a good reputation should be commended, but when there exists in a country a man or woman of great renown, people who are ENVIOUS of their abilities frequently speak insultingly of them in order damage this reputation. Thus they start acting like a VICIOUS, COWARDLY, TREACHEROUS DOG which will BITE others out of MALICE. But just because SPITEFUL TITTLE-TATTLERS attempt to find fault with me I DO NOT INTEND TO GIVE UP. They have a RIGHT to make SLANDEROUS REMARKS.”*
– Guigemar, lines probably 2-26, all-caps mine,
by Marie de France, medieval hip-hop artist, basically**
Oh my god. If I were a time-traveler I would bring her into the present (after she’s done with her big tour, but before she died an early death) and marry her. Or attempt to marry her, probably unsuccessfully.
She’s just obviously ALL ABOUT dat drama lyf and I can’t. I just can’t
*I want this quote on a baggy jersey w/ a hip-hop stylized image of Marie de France, and I wouldn’t care how few people got it, honestly
**Can we just agree, already, that Marie de France was a hip-hop artist and embodied everything about hip-hop culture, including the petty drama?
Fond memories of overhearing a group of undergraduates discussing their first reading of Chaucer: “It’s so dirty! I had no idea!”
(I taught Chaucer, once upon a time. Most of the students coped with the Middle English, but a few got terribly intimidated and just floundered through those weeks on the syllabus.)
THEY GIVE THIS TO 15-YEAR-OLD ITALIAN KIDS TO STUDY. AT LEAST AT THE SCHOOL I WORKED IN.
(I feel like it was in Modern English not the original, but still. STILL.)
(Not as bad as teaching the 17-year-olds Joyce and Woolf, though. At least Chaucer is straightforward.)
*I* was gonna say, at least Chaucer has as a dick joke on every page
Notice, though, that he’s getting much better as he goes. By the last few verses he’s got something like 90% of it right. 🙂 But no, I can still recite the first two lines from memory, and I’m enough of an history geek (get exposed to old spellings and turns of phrase) that I can do better, but not by much.
That’s why, like my teacher, you make the kids try it out just like this–maybe with a bit of coaching (try saying it out loud and playing with the vowels a little; “bifell” is only one vowel different from modern) and reassurance (most of his “Is THAT what it says?” are right!), but just to see how the languageS differ and where they’re the same. Then you actually learn it from translation, because you haven’t actually been taught to read Middle English!
“I’m not that smart.”
Smart has nothing to do with not being able to read words, phrases, or concepts in a foreign language–and a solid (although smaller than it appears at first!) chunk of Middle English *is* completely foreign to a Modern English speaker.)
And as a linguist I think you’ll probably have fun with it the way I did. Hint–read aloud and let the vowels get mushy or shift around and you’ll understand a lot more of it. The spelling is so far off ours on many words that actually did survive that it makes it look harder than it is. (It worked for me in school; you probably know the actual proper vowel shifts to apply though. ;-))
I still think we should give Chaucer credit for his pretentious Southern vocabulary. Middle English regional variation being what it was, I’m pretty sure he had plenty of quaint Germanic synonyms to choose from for things like “perced” and “tendre” but stuck with the French out of consideration for anyone who might be reading his work 600 years later.
I memorised it by choice. It's MY party trick. 🙂
I tried memorising The Walrus and the Carpenter, but a bit too long.
I'm sure a large number of those courtly French words persisted precisely because Chaucer used them!