Middle English and Chaucer

Every modern language seems to have its vital, foundational literary work: Italian has Dante's Divine Comedy, Spanish has Don Quixote, and English has Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. And yet, like other such works, the writings of Chaucer are more often talked about than read; unlike Shakespeare's, his characters have not so often strutted upon the stage. In the UK, the BBC has done them both as a period puppet piece as well as a modernized version, and in 1972 the great Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini made a memorable film version -- but here in the US there have been no major film or television adaptations, unless you count the somewhat squishy "A Knight's Tale." Still, Chaucer's influence has been deeply felt; his Troylus and Criseyde was one of Shakespeare's sources for his play of the same name; the Wife of Bath's Prologue was translated in 1700 by John Dryden; and in the twentieth century there have been no fewer than seven translations or adaptations of the Canterbury Tales into modern English, most recently by Peter Ackroyd (in prose) and Sheila Fisher (in verse).

And Chaucer's language is very close to ours -- close enough that, with a modest amount of practice, we can pronounce it and understand it reasonably well.  The main differences are that many combination of letters which are now silent, such as kn and gh, were pronounced, as was the e on the end of so many words which has since become our modern English friend "silent e." Lastly, the vowels of Chaucer's day were further back in the mouth, since the "Great Vowel Shift" which moved them forwards had not yet taken place.  Thus Chaucer's "Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote" is pronounced as "Whahnn that ah-prill, weeth hees shooriss soat-uh" in our reconstructed Chaucerian mode.  

The other difference is mainly vocabulary -- "lexical" as linguists would say. Chaucer still used a number of words left over from older English; a "swevene" was a dream; "eke" meant "indeed" or "as well"; he used "lykned" instead of "likened," "hem" instead of "them" and "hire" instead of "their" there was no neuter possessive "its" so everything had to be "hys" or hers. Happily, there are many fewer such survivals in his verse than in that of the Gawain poet, who, living the north-west Midlands, was removed from many of the changes of London English and still used athele (noble), sithen (since), schawe (show), and lovelokkest (loveliest).

Chaucer was also on the forefront of many changes of which modern English has been the beneficiary; he introduced many words and usages from French, some in their Anglo-Norman senses, nearly all of which are still with us today: bachelor, melody, adversary, bounty, refute, vein, army, season, and devout. He borrowed a few Latin terms, though most often via their French versions, and his verse structures, such as "rhyme royal,"turned out to be particularly effective in English.

Old English

Lines from the poem are carved in runes on this cross.

The land now known as England was originally inhabited by an unknown culture of people, sometimes referred to as "Megalithic" people (a reference to the standing stones they left at, among other places, Stonehenge).  These people were displaced by Celtic tribes, who in their turn were pushed back to the peripheries of the island by three Germanic tribes -- the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes -- who arrived in the fifth century to fill the power vacuum left by the departing Roman colonizers.  We know little of their culture, though, and nothing of their literature, until the moment when they were converted to Christianity -- and literacy -- a couple of centuries later, and some of the earliest texts we know are those used by missionaries to help persuade the Anglo-Saxons of the superiority of Christian belief. In fact, the very oldest written text -- The Dream of the Rood -- survives in part as a runic inscription on a stone cross (shown here).  The Dream is a proselytizing poem -- a poem that sought to convert its readers actively. The main speaker of the poem, in fact, is the Cross itself, which explains why it had to allow Christ to be crucified upon it -- a vital "backstory" for the Saxons, who considered crucifixion to be be"fraecodes gealga" -- the thieves' gallows. The cross, in contrast, represents itself as a faithful thegn (military follower) who only did as his Lord commanded, and was rewarded by having a mini-resurrection of his own, uplifted into the light of heaven, where it was covered with gold and rich gems, a hero's reward.

As with modern English, there were several major dialects of Anglo-Saxon: Northumbrian in the North, Kentish in the East, Mercian in the midlands, and West Saxon in the West of England. The political center of the Saxons was in Winchester (Wintanceastre) in the West Saxon area, and thus its speech became the prestige dialect of the language; more than 90% of surviving Old English texts are in this dialect. Much has changed since then, but even to this day, if you look at the top decile of English (the top 10% of our most frequently-used words), nearly all of them are directly descended from closely similar Saxon antecedents: stone (stan); house (hus); was (wæs); say (secgan); father (fæder); and many more.

In addition to The Dream of the Rood, we'll have a look at Cædmon's Hymn and King Alfred's preface to St. Greogory's Treatise on Pastoral Care, and Ælfric's Colloquy, passages from which we'll go over in class.

The roots of English

Image courtesy The Guardian

Language is a strange thing. Human beings seem to have devised speech systems quite a long time ago -- perhaps 150,000 years -- but nearly all of its early evolution is lost to us; since there were no writing systems until about 5,000 years ago, we have only the very last slice of this history in hand.

That said, we can at least sketch out where English stands in this latter-day family tree. At about the time the cuneiform was invented by Sumerian scribes, a large group of as-yet-illiterate peoples were clustered around the slopes and steppes of the Caucasus mountain that divide Europe from Asia. Their speech was the ancient ancestor of a great many languages that still exist today, among them Hindi, Bengali, Latin, Italian, German, Greek, Turkish and Irish. Linguists have been able to trace a good many "root" words in this speech, even though it was never written; these roots are "hypothetical" but almost certainly existed. This status is shown by their being preceded by an asterisk -- so, for instance, the root *nrek-, which is the original word for king or ruler. In Sanskrit, it evolved into "Rig" (as in the Rig Veda or Royal Vedas), while in Latin it became "Rex" (though retaining the "g" in its possessive form, "regis"); in French it's Roi and in Irish Rí. Modern English however chose a different branch; its work "King" comes from the Germanic branch, where in German it's König; the Old English form was "cyning" (with a hard "c").

Old English itself branched off from the Germanic tree when its speakers crossed the English Channel somewhere between the fourth and fifth centuries; the Romans had gone home and they came to fill the power vacuum. Long before, of course, the Celtic peoples (ancestors of the Irish, Welsh and Scots) had been there already, and before them the "megalithic" people who set up Stonehenge -- but no matter. Its speakers were illiterate, but luckily were converted to Christianity somewhere around the year 700. This mean that they had to both learn Latin (then the universal language of the Church) but also could use its letters to come up with the means of writing out their own tongue. This they did along very phonetic lines; all letters in Old English sound like what they look like ("C" always being hard like "K") though there were a couple of exceptions. The special characters thorn (Þ) and edh (ð) were used for voiceless and voiced "th," and Æ (for the Bugs Bunny "aaah" sound) was known as "ash" (spelled "æsc").

The collected body of written works in Old English that survive is quite small, a mere 400 or so manuscripts. Nearly all of them are in one dialect -- "West Saxon" -- which was (not unexpectedly) the dialect spoken by its most powerful rulers, who were based in the western area around their capital of Winchester. The far greater body of speakers in the area around London spoke a dialect known as "Mercian," of which little written materials survive.

All of this, of course, was turned topsy-turvy when the French-speaking Normans conquered in 1066, making English a subaltern speech -- at least for a couple of centuries -- to Norman French -- of which more anon.

Introducing .... the International Phonetic Alphabet!

One of the things that makes English so distinct from most of the other languages on the planet is its unusually inconsistent and unpredictable spelling. Due to changes in the sounds of English over time, many letters once pronounced are now silent -- particularly our old friend "silent e." Add to that the fact that, as our vowel system changed, many words that use the same vowel are pronounced completely differently, and you have a pretty difficult spelling "system." The spelling reformer and playwright George Bernard Shaw jested at this by claiming that "fish" should be spelled "ghoti" -- since gh spells 'f' in "laugh," o is pronounced 'i' in "women," and ti spells 'sh' in "notion!

To save us from all this, and to enable us to understand English's changing sounds, the powers that be sent us the International Phonetic Alphabet. It may look a bit daunting, but it has the great advantage that, within it, one letter indicates one, and precisely one sound, and is always consistent.

I've provided a link to an excellent video tutorial (here and at the top of our links list -- have a look and a listen. It's a remarkable video, in that with it, you can both hear the IPA sounds and see the way the jaw, tongue, lips, and teeth make them.  At first it may seem daunting, it's fairly easy to get used to; after all, these are noises we've all been making nearly all our lives. And then, just for practice, see if you can transcribe one of the most familiar sequences of sounds -- your own name. You can write it out on a piece of paper, or if you like there are downloadable fonts that will enable you to type them out. 

Welcome

Wæs þu hæl !

Welcome to our class blog for ENGL 432, Studies in the English Language, Spring semester 2024, here at Rhode Island College.

Our language is, in an important sense, the most vital and intimate kind of history we have. Language bears the marks of all our other histories: our movements, our settlings, our neighbors, and our enemies. By looking deep into this glass, we can learn when we first needed names for things, whether it was “mouse” – quite possibly one of the oldest words in English – or “biohacking,” one of its newest. And, although the vast majority of language change is so gradual as to be almost imperceptible, there are moments when speech itself becomes a matter of contention, or undergoes an interval of significant, radical change. It’s these instances that will be the exemplary moments we’ll be studying in this class; many of them still shape our speech today, and each of them reveals the way in which language mirrors – or sometimes instigates – social change.

This blog will serve as a clearing-house many of our discussions, as well as a resource page where you'll find many useful links to language resources online. Make it yours! For, like the guests at a wedding, if we have anything to say about our language, we had best speak now, or forever hold our peace.