The Old English Worldview PDF

The Old English Worldview Lecture 7 This relationship between dialect and power, dialect and culture, will become one of the central themes of this course, not simply for the Anglo-Saxon period, but for the Middle Ages, Renaissance, modern Britain, and America as well. W hen we look at Anglo-Saxon culture, we’re looking primarily at verbal artifacts; we need to explore how these artifacts built structures in the mind. The Anglo-Saxon speakers of Old English tended to resist importing words, in favor of coining words based on their own root stock. However, scholars have identiﬁed two broad periods of borrowing in Old English, known as continental and insular. The continental period of borrowing took place during the ﬁrst centuries A.D., while the Germanic peoples were still situated on the European continent and had contact with a living Roman imperial and cultural presence. Words that came into the Germanic languages at this point survive in Modern English. As we know, the Romans were famous for their roads, and the Latin word strata, meaning street, appears in virtually every language that the Romans came into contact with. We might think that such words as street, strasse, stratum, and strada are cognates (that is, they all descended from an original shared Indo-European root) but, in fact, they descend from a Latin word that was consciously borrowed into the Germanic and other European languages. The Romans built roads to move their armies, and thus words for war are among the earliest borrowings from Latin into the Germanic languages. These include such words as camp, wall, mile, and pit. Latin words for trade also entered the Germanic languages. For example, the Latin word caupo means a small tradesman; this entered the Germanic languages as cheap in English or kaufen in German. In Scandinavian languages, a tradesman was a kaupmann, and his haven or port was a kaupmannhofen. This would later become the name for the city of Copenhagen. Such words as wine, pound, and mint were also Latin loan words that entered the Germanic languages during the continental period, 35 along with words for specialty foods (cheese, pepper, butter, plum, prune, pea) and words for architecture (chalk, copper, pitch, tile). The Latin Caesar gave words for political control in many languages, such as German Kaiser and Russian tsar. By the time the Anglo-Saxons came to the British Isles, the Roman Empire had been Christian for about a century and a half. During the 6th and 7th centuries, missionaries from Rome were sent to northern Europe and the British Isles to convert the Germanic peoples. During this insular period, Latin loan words for newer religious concepts, older Celtic terms from the indigenous Celtic peoples living in the British Isles, and words from the Scandinavian languages of Viking and Danish raiders in England came into the Germanic languages. Words from Celtic and Latin Christianity borrowed in the 6th– In terms of vocabulary, 7th centuries include cross, priest, shrine, “Caedmon’s Hymn” rule, school, master, and pupil. offers us a lexicon for Words from Scandinavian Germanic the divine. languages were borrowed after contact with the Vikings and the Danes during their raids on England in the 8th–9th centuries. These words were distinguished by special sounds in the Scandinavian languages, in particular, the sounds sk and k which corresponded to the sounds sh and ch in Old English. Thus, Scandinavian skirt, kirk, skip, and dike have Germanic Lecture 7: The Old English Worldview family cognates in Old English shirt, church, ship, and ditch. Scandinavian languages also had a hard g sound that was not present in Old English; the words muggy, ugly, egg, and rugged are Scandinavian borrowings; certain words with the ll sound, such as ill, were also borrowed. In the 10th and 11th centuries, during the period of the Benedictine Reform, more elaborate and learned Latin words came into Old English, including Antichrist, apostle, canticle, demon, font, nocturne, Sabbath, synagogue, accent, history, paper, and so on. Old English also made new words with distinctive approaches to compounding. Determinative compounding is common to all the Germanic languages and involves forming new words by yoking together two normally 36 independent nouns or a noun and an adjective. Examples of determinative compounding with two nouns include earhring (earring) or bocstæf (bookstaff, meaning “letter”). Examples with an adjective and a noun include middangeard (middle-yard, “Earth”), federhoma (feather coat, “plumage”), and bonlocan (bone locker, “body”). Many of these words make up the unique poetic vocabulary of Old English literature, especially in metaphorical constructions known as kennings. A kenning is a noun metaphor that expresses a familiar object in unfamiliar ways. The sea, for example, could be known as the hronrad, whale road. Repetitive compounding brings together words that are nearly identical or that complement and reinforce each other for speciﬁc effect. Thus, holtwudu meant, essentially, wood-wood, in Old English, or forest; gangelwæfre meant the going-about weaver or the swift-moving one, that is, a spider. Noun- adjective formations constitute another approach to compounding, giving us græsgrene (grass green), lofgeorn (praise-eager, or eager for praise), and goldhroden (gold-adorned). In Modern English, this form of compounding is revived in such phrases as king-emperor or ﬁghter-bomber. Preﬁx formations were the most common way of creating new words in Old English and other Germanic languages. Old English had many preﬁxes that derived from prepositions and altered the meanings of words in special ways. For example, the preﬁx and- meant back or in response to. Thus, one could swear in Old English or andswar, meaning to answer. The preﬁx with- meant against. One could stand or withstand something in Old English, meaning to stand against. Old English poets and scholars used the resources of their language, in particular its ability to make nouns through compounds and preﬁxes, to create an elaborate metaphorical and literary language. Most of the words mentioned in this lecture are nouns, and most of the words that survive into Modern English from Old English are nouns and pronouns. Old English seems to have a tendency to develop large classes of nouns—groups of synonyms for clarifying concepts through repetition and restatement, rather than (as we do now) through progressively more distinctive adjectives or adverbs. 37 He uses the forms of oral-formulaic, alliterative English verse to express new Christian ideas. His poem illustrates the principles of Old English word formation in the compounds, nouns, and repetitions he uses. To see “Caedmon’s Hymn” in context is to see the Old English language pressed into the service of Christian imagination. As we’ll see in future lectures, that combination would be subsumed by the conquest of the Normans, the importation of French, and radical changes in politics, culture, idiom, and ideology. Suggested Reading Barney, Word-Hoard: An Introduction to Old English Vocabulary. Baugh and Cable, A History of the English Language. Godden, “Literary Language.” O’Keeffe, Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England. Questions to Consider Lecture 7: The Old English Worldview 1. Explain several ways that Old English created new words. 2. What were the chief characteristics of Old English as a literary language? 40 Did the Normans Really Conquer English? Lecture 8 I’d like to disabuse us of the notion that on some blustery day in the fall of 1066, the English language and English culture irrevocably changed—that one day Anglo-Saxons were a group of pipe-toting, mead-swilling barbarians who overnight were transformed into a group of fops eating champignons in a beurre-blanc sauce. T he year 1066, the date of the Norman Conquest of England, is shrouded in mystery and mythology. What did the Norman Conquest do to English? Did the Normans really conquer the English language? How can we see the effects of this political upheaval on the history of English and in our own study of the language today? In this lecture, we’ll review some of the major effects that the Norman Conquest had on the English language, but we’ll also see that the language was changing long before the conquest and continued to change throughout the British Isles in spite of the inﬂuence of T the French-speaking Normans. X / Let’s begin with some of the natural changes in Old English that took place from its earliest times. Recall that our best evidence for language change is the writing of the barely literate. In several texts from the 10th and 11th centuries, we can see that the complex system of noun case endings was & Theloss gradually being lost. As mentioned earlier, Old English had an inﬂectional system, in which special endings were used to distinguish whether a noun was the subject of a sentence, the direct object, the indirect object, the object of possession, or the instrument of an action. The term that describes the falling 55 together of the old system of case endings is “syncretism.” In this process, - endings collapse into smaller and smaller groups, until a limited collection of sounds comes to represent a larger set of grammatical categories. of the loss T LIn addition to noun endings, adjective endings (such as those that delineated & the loss of number or gender) were lost in this period of Old English. Verb endings were maintained, but simpliﬁed. Old English, like other Indo-European languages, loss & the had a dual pronoun in addition to the singular and plural (I and we). This third pronoun signaled two people, but this distinctive feature of the language was the loss ful Pronoun s of 41 G also lost in this period. Grammatical gender disappeared, to be replaced by natural gender. Nouns were no longer masculine, feminine, or neuter. Why did these changes take place? Some theories have been proposed that hinge on stress, form, and function. Old English, like all Germanic languages, had ﬁxed stress on the root syllable of the word. In other words, regardless of what preﬁxes or sufﬁxes were added to the word, the stress remained on the root syllable. Examples include come, become; timber, betimber (to build); swerian, answerian (answer). Some scholars believe that this insistent stress tended to level out the sounds of unstressed syllables. Any sound or syllable - that did not take the full word stress, such as a grammatical ending, would - not have been pronounced clearly. - Theories that focus on form and function assert that as ﬁnal endings became harder to distinguish, new ways of establishing meaning were necessary. Let’s walk through an example. Old English had a fully developed set of prepositions: of, with, before, on, and to. These were used to signal - relationships among words in various kinds of phrases, but case endings still - - served the same function. Thus, a noun in the dative case did not need a Lecture 8: Did the Normans Really Conquer English? - preposition. A line from Beowulf reads: Him tha yldesta wordhord unleac, or To him, the eldest unlocked his word hoard, meaning he unlocked his words or spoke. The line contains no preposition, but him is in the dative - case so the sentence should be understood to mean The oldest one spoke to - him. In Late Old English and Middle English, these grammatical categories of the loss 7u ending - case new lost their distinctions and prepositions took over. Patterns of word order also became regularized as syntax (rather than case endings) became the way of 7 - expressing grammatical relationships in a sentence. Certain patterns, such as subject-verb-object, became standard. What is the evidence for this kind of change? As we’ve noted, linguists look ① for written evidence showing a level of literacy high enough to record sounds - and forms but not so well-developed as to use conventions of writing apart - ② from speech. Linguists also look for texts that can be dated and localized to - a particular region. During the Anglo-Saxon period, monks, teachers, and scribes kept year-by-year histories in prose called “annals.” An excellent - example is the Peterborough Chronicle, kept by monks until the year 1154. - This document records language change in ways that are at times subtle and - 42 signiﬁcant. Because Peterborough was somewhat geographically removed - from the initial impact of the Norman Conquest, its records illustrate few effects of Norman French. Each chronicle entry is the set of events of a given year, and each one begins with a phrase meaning in this year. & It’s important to note that the chronicle was not necessarily kept year by X year. Instead, our evidence tells us that every 20 years, or 10, or ﬁve, a scribe would copy out what had happened in the preceding years. In this way, blocks of text highlight—in gross form—the ways in which the English language was changing during the transitional period right after the Norman Conquest. Let’s look at the following examples: Year Phrase Notes 1083 on þisum geare The endings “-um” and “-e” signal a dative masculine singular. This is classic Old English. 1117 on þison geare The “-um” ending has been replaced with “-on.” The adjectival ending seems to have been replaced with an indiscriminate vowel plus an indiscriminate nasal (“-m” or “-n”). This may be the scribe’s attempt to preserve a grammatical ending or preserve the sound of speech. 1135 on þis geare The adjectival ending of this has been lost, but the “-e” at the end of geare still signals a dative. Concord in grammatical gender is obviously gone by this time. E 1154 on þis gear The endings have completely disappeared. We are no longer in the world of inﬂected Old English. V 43 We can trace several other changes in the period after the Norman Conquest. As mentioned earlier, word order patterns were regularized. The order of subject-verb-object became the standard for the simple declarative sentence. Other word order patterns were used for special kinds of expression; for example, in In asking a question, asking a question, the standard word order the standard word would be inverted to verb-subject-object: order would be inverted Know I the way? Both Shakespeare and the to verb-subject-object: King James Bible preserve this archaism in Know I the way? Both asking questions. Other archaisms, such as methinks, meaning it seems to me, survived Shakespeare and the until the time of the Renaissance. King James Bible O preserve this. Over time, the sound of the language also changed. Again, let’s look at a few - & examples: Old English began to lose some of the characteristic consonant clusters that gave it its distinctive sound. The O hl-, hr-, hn-, and fn- clusters leveled out to l-, r-, n-, and sn-. Compression of syllables occurred in such terms as hlaf weard, guardian of the loaf, which Lecture 8: Did the Normans Really Conquer English? - was shortened to become Lord. Certain Old English words underwent a - special sound change called “metathesis.” This is the inversion of sounds 3 in order. We hear this when we identify certain regional dialects by the pronunciation “aks” for ask. During the Late Old English and Early Middle English periods, certain words permanently metathesized their sounds: brid ⑪ → bird; axian → ask; thurgh → through; beorht → bright. Some strong verbs (need, help, wax) changed to weak ones.- z The system of making meaning was changing at the same time that newer French words were inﬂecting the language. Let’s close again with poetry. As we saw when we looked at “Caedmon’s Hymn,” Old English poetry was constructed with a certain number of strong alliterative stresses in each - line. The number of total syllables in the line was not relevant, nor was - as "Creamon's numn" rhyming important. In France, however, the organization of the poetic line was determined by the absolute number of syllables in the line. An eight- syllable iambic line would have four beats or stresses (iambic tetrameter).Q A 10-syllable iambic line would have ﬁve stresses (iambic pentameter). The - French brought this new structure for poetry to the British Isles. O 44 “The Owl and the Nightingale,” written about the year 1200, is the earliest English poem composed in sustained octosyllabic rhymed couplets. It is essentially a French poem written in English: Ich was in one sumere dale; In one suþe di3ele hale Iherde ich holde grete tale An Hule and one Ni3tingale. I was in a summery dale; In one hidden, pretty dark nook, Where I heard there being held a great tale [or discussion] Between an Owl and a Nightingale. X & As we’ll see in subsequent lectures, this poetic structure informs the English architectural, idiomatic, cultural, and political structures, as well. How will French and a French vocabulary affect the speech and the sensibility of the# * conquered peoples? Suggested Reading Baugh and Cable, A History of the English Language. Bennett and Smithers, Early Middle English Verse and Prose. Clark, ed., Peterborough Chronicle. Lerer, “Old English and Its Afterlife.” Questions to Consider 1. In what ways was Old English already changing before the Norman French arrived in England? 2. How did Old English word endings evolve independent of Norman inﬂuence—and what is a plausible explanation for this phenomenon? 45 What Did the Normans Do to English? Lecture 9 What the Norman Conquest did in altering the vocabulary structure of > English was not simply increase the raw vocabulary—the raw number of words—it changed conceptually or systematically the vernacular in the British Isles. It changed it from one that resisted the acceptance of loan words to one that accepted almost voraciously new loan words. I n the last lecture, we saw some ways in which Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons, was changing even before the inﬂux of the Norman French. For example, grammatical gender and case endings that signaled relationships among nouns in sentences were beginning to disappear before the Norman Conquest. However, the Normans did bring new words, concepts, and social and institutional structures to the British Isles that had an impact on the language and literature. Why do new words enter a language? What happens when two languages skid mechany come into contact? Words are borrowed mainly for two reasons. The ﬁrst some Lecture 9: What Did the Normans Do to English? reason for borrowing is that the donor language is of greater prestige. After the & - Norman Conquest, French terms for government, political organization, high culture (especially cookery), and educated discourse came to be preferred. The second reason for borrowing is that a vacant slot for a borrowed word - exists in the receiving language; in other words, if there is no native word for a concept or thing and the new language community brings that thing or concept in, then it comes with the new word. twosotsupe But some languages, including both ancient and modern Germanic languages, resist bringing in loan words and prefer to coin their own. One Modern German word for television, for example, is a bit-by-bit translation of that word that means far seer: Fernseher. In altering the vocabulary structure of English, the Norman Conquest did not simply increase the raw number of words, but it changed the vernacular in the British Isles from one that resisted the acceptance of loan words to one that accepted them almost voraciously. 46 The effect of new borrowed words into a language: New words brought into a language can affect word stress. In the Germanic languages and Old English, in particular, word stress was ﬁxed on the root syllable of a word, but this was not true for the Romance languages, including French and Norman French. The idea of variable word stress can be seen in Modern English. For example, the word record (pronounced “re- CORD”) is a verb, but record (with the accent on the ﬁrst syllable) is a noun. Here, different stress patterns on different syllables change the meaning and grammatical function of the word. We see another example in canon word cove be nown (an accepted set of texts, values, or individuals), pronounced “CA-non,” the and canonization (the act of making a canon), with the stress on the “a” before “tion.” Changes also occurred in poetry. Old English poetry was alliterative in structure; that is, the principle of organization was the repetition of an initial consonant or vowel in the words, combined with the number of strong stresses in a line. Recall from our last lecture the poem known as “The Owl and the Nightingale.” This poem was probably composed around the yearE 1200, and it seems to be the ﬁrst sustained poem in English written in octosyllabic rhymed couplets (rhymed verse in which each line has eight syllables and four stresses). Even though the structure is The inﬂuence of continental, however, the vocabulary is largely French is especially Old English. apparent in matters The ﬁfth line of this poem is as follows: … of cuisine. plait was stif and starc and strong. The word plait, used to describe the debate between the owl and nightingale, is from Norman French, and is at the heart of our word complaint. It’s a technical term from French rhetoric meaning discussion or argument. The end of the line, stif and starc and strong, however, almost seems to be Old English alliterative poetry struggling to release itself from the constraining French octosyllabic line. In this one line of poetry, we see the way in which contact changes the texture, stress, and literary structure of languages, in addition to their vocabulary. 47 The borrowings from French into Middle English came during two periods, one associated directly with the Normans; the other, with later Parisian or Central French loans.&The Norman French loans came in the 11th–12th centuries from the original group of conquerors, their families, and their lineal descendants. Both &religious terms, such as prophet, saint, Baptist, Oterms miracle, paradise, and sacrament, and words - of social and political control, such as prince, dame, master, court, rent, poor, rich, prison, crown, purple, and prove, entered the English language. al Terms from architecture also came into the language, in particular, the word castle. The Anglo-Saxons did not build monumentally in dressed stone; large structures were built of timber or in ﬂint cobble. As soon as the Normans arrived, however, they built castles. The word castle comes from Latin, meaning an enclosed or fortiﬁed encampment. In the Peterborough Chronicle, the ﬁrst line of a poem on the death of William the Conqueror (d. 1087) is “Castelas he let wyrcean,” “He had castles built.” This line signals linguistically the imposition of a new structure on the English landscape. The poem about William the Conqueror also makes an awkward attempt at rhymed couplets, probably the ﬁrst such attempt in English. The Anglo- Lecture 9: What Did the Normans Do to English? Saxon writer tries to evoke not just the architectural change to the landscape - but the prosodic change in the language: Castelas he let wyrcean, 7 earme men swiðe swencean. Se cyng wæs swa swiðe stearc, 7 bena of his underþeoddan manig marc goldes 7 ma hundred punda seolfres. He had castles built and [poor] men terribly oppressed. The king was very severe, and he took from his underlings many marks of gold and hundreds of pounds of silver. 48 After the Norman Conquest, a new wave of speakers came to the British ↓ O Isles, bringing with them what is known as Central or Parisian French, in the 13th–14th centuries. Note that the Normans (“Northmen”) were originally a Germanic people from Scandinavia. Thus, the pronunciation&of Norman French has some similarities to that of the Germanic languages, whereas the why ? pronunciation of Central French has sounds that are far closer to those of the Romance languages. Norman French words that begin with the “k-” sound (written as “c”) correspond to Central French words that begin with the “sh-” sound (written as ch): castle-chateau; cattle-chattel; cap-chapeau. Norman French initial “w-” (a glide) corresponds to Central French initial “gu-” (a stop): warden- guardian; ward-guard; wile-guile; war-guerre; William-Guillaume. French loan words in English are easy to spot: Words spelled with ei, ey, or oy: cloy, joy. Endings in -ion or -ioun: extension, retention. Endings in -ment: emolument, condiment. Endings in -ence or -aunce: existence. Endings in -or or -our: color, honor. In Central French, words that end in -ous are adjectives; words that end in -us are nouns. Thus, callous is an adjective, while callus is a noun. This spelling convention still works in Modern English.explain The inﬂuence of French is especially apparent in matters of cuisine, itself a French word. Sir Walter Scott noted in his novel Ivanhoe that words for animals are Old English and words for meats are French. We might imagine an Anglo-Saxon peasant raising a cow on his land, but when that cow appeared as meat on a Norman Frenchman’s table, it became boeuf (beef). The same transformation is seen in calf-veal, deer-venison, and sheep- mutton. These kinds of pairings show us how French became the language of high culture, while English remained the language of the land. 49 & Medieval England was a trilingual culture.? Latin had become the language of the church, education, and philosophy. French was the language of administration, culture, and courtiership. English was the language of popular expression, regional dialect, and personal reﬂection. The Harley Lyrics, - a collection of literature written probably in the 1330s in Hertfordshire, gives us clear evidence of writers and readers who were, in a broad sense, trilingual. One poem in the manuscript (#2253) ends with this quatrain: Scripsi hec carmina in tabulis; Latin triling wit Mon ostel es en mi la vile de Paris; Evench May y sugge namore, so wel me is; MiddleEnglish 3ef hi de3e for loue of hire, duel hit ys. I have written these verses on my tablets; My dwelling is in the middle of the city of Paris; Let me say no more, so things are ﬁne; But if I die for love of her, it would be a pity. The ﬁrst line here is in Latin, the second is in French, and the third and D fourth are in Middle English. This poem shows us the brilliance of medieval 3. Lecture 9: What Did the Normans Do to English? & trilingual culture, to be found in the stratiﬁcation of languages. An English - schoolboy would write on his tablet in the language of learning—Latin. When he went to the university, he would have traveled to Paris and learned French. But when he wanted to express himself and his love, he would have done so in his own Middle English. In this lecture and the previous one, we’ve seen how the Norman Conquest and the importation of the French language had an impact on the structure, sound, spelling, and vocabulary of English, as well as on the imaginative world of the British Isles. In the next lecture, we’ll continue our exploration of this imaginative world by turning to the poetry of Chaucer, a writer who was as deeply trilingual as the poet of The Harley Lyrics. 50 Suggested Reading Baugh and Cable, A History of the English Language. Bennett and Smithers, Early Middle English Verse and Prose. Blake, ed., The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. 2, p. 1066–1476. Questions to Consider 1. Why does a perfectly healthy language adopt loan words from another language? 2. What are some of the major endings or clusters of letters that identify a word as French in origin? 51 Chaucer’s English Lecture 10 Chaucer’s English. I’m going to look at the ways in which he develops out of the matrix of regional dialect—English, French, and Latin—and the history of the language as he experienced it … a supple poetic form, vocabulary, and idiom. But I also want to look at the ways in which Chaucer’s language reﬂects the culture and experience of its time. A s we noted in the last lecture, the languages of Latin, French, and English coexisted in medieval England as strata of verbal expression and experience. Latin was the language of the church and of intellectual and philosophical inquiry; French was the language of the court, the government, and high culture; while English belonged to the street and the farm—the language of personal expression and intimate communication. These three languages coexisted for more than 200 years, and, in their coexistence, gave rise to a form of the vernacular that reached its literary apogee in the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer did his major work in English, though he, too, was trilingual, in a sense. He had close contact with French and Latin, and his English synthesizes several- regional dialects. In this lecture, we’ll explore the history of the language as Chaucer experienced it and how he developed, out of that matrix of English, French, and Latin, a & supple poetic form, vocabulary, and idiom. We’ll also look at the ways in - which Chaucer’s language reﬂects the culture and experience of its time. Chaucer was born probably around the year 1340. As a young man, he entered Lecture 10: Chaucer’s English * aristocratic service, rising high in the circles of court and the city of London. He served in Parliament, and in the 1380s–1390s he was clerk of the King’s - Works, with the job of staging events for King Richard II. Chaucer’s English, therefore, was the language of an educated public servant in late-14th-century London. He had probably been schooled in Latin and gained familiarity with French in his service to the court. We know that he made some diplomatic forays into Italy in the 1370s, where he may have met the great Italian poets & Petrarch and Boccaccio. Note that in this trilingual world, there were some authors who wrote in all three languages, notably John Gower, Chaucer’s friend and lawyer. In Chaucer himself, we ﬁnd a writer who knows other 52 languages and cultures and who synthesizes vocabulary, syntax, form, and idiom into a unique literary expression of the cosmopolitan life of his time. * [ The central features of Chaucer’s language are its pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax and grammar, and attitude toward language. In looking at the ﬁrst of Trowes these features, pronunciation, we know that Chaucer’s language was a dialect of Middle English made up of elements drawn from East Midland dialects to sonums ↳ [ help form what would become a London standard. The vowel system Chaucer language used would have been= T very much like the southern Old English vowel system and# similar to the vowels of the modern spoken European languages. - - The characteristic consonant clusters of Old English were disappearing in Chaucer’s time. For example, Old English hring became ring; hwat became what. There were no silent letters in words. Final -e was usually pronounced, as were all the syllables in a word such as marriage (“ma·ri·ag·e”). Chaucer’s vocabulary deploys for the ﬁrst time a whole range of new words from French and Latin. He draws on the learned vocabularies of the universities, courts, guilds, and European literary traditions. But he also relies on the native Old English resources of his language, often, as we will see, for striking effect. C Under the heading of syntax and grammar, Chaucer’s word order is often inﬂuenced by the metre of his poetry. The Canterbury Tales is written in iambic pentameter (ﬁve-beat, 10-syllable lines), and the lines rhyme in couplets; obviously, these constraints sometimes affected the poet’s choices in word order. Nonetheless, it’s fair to say that Chaucer’s word order patterns seem to stand midway between the inﬂected forms of Old English and the - - full, uninﬂ - ected patterns of Modern English. Chaucer used the standard & - subject-verb-object word-order pattern for a declarative sentence. To ask a question in Middle English, however, the order of subject and verb was inverted. (We do not see the addition of the word do -manat the beginning of a sentence to ask a question until the mid-16th century.) Similarly, word order could be reversed for a command, in claims of negation, or for emphasis: > - ⑫ regation Gave you the ball? Gave the ball, you? I, the ball gave. It is important to note that negation, in Old, Middle, and even Early Modern English, was A cumulative. Double negatives didn’t cancel each other out; they reinforced each other. Chaucer’s description of the knight, for example, in the General 53 * Prologue of The Canterbury Tales is as follows: He nevere yet ne vylanye ne saide unto no maner wight, (He never yet, in no way, said anything bad, nohow, to nobody). - G Pronouns were also important in Chaucer’s Middle English. In Old, Middle, and Early Modern English, as in many modern European languages, two sets of pronouns were used. In Middle English, the second-person singular and informal pronouns were thou (nominative), thee (dative and accusative), & & and thy or thine (genitive); the corresponding plural and formal pronouns - were ye, you, and your, respectively. The distinction between these two sets - > - - of pronouns was one of class, not simply number. We must suspend our intuition in realizing that thee and thou were once informal, not formal. The opening sentence of the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales shows us how Chaucer makes meaning out of the linguistic resources of his time and place. If we think of this famous 18-line sentence cinematically, we see the camera of the poet’s eye panning down from the imperium to the surface of the Earth, and we move from the sky—the zodiac, the winds—to the treetops and the land itself. We then move from the periphery of England to the focal point in Canterbury. Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour Of which vertu engendred is the ﬂour; Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heath Lecture 10: Chaucer’s English The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne, And smale foweles maken melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open ye (So priketh hem nature in hir corages), Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes, To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes; And specially from every shires ende Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende, 54 The hooly blisful martir for to seke, That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke. When it happens that April, with his sweet showers, has pierced the y drought of March to the root, and bathed every vein in that ﬂuid from whose power the ﬂower is given birth; when Zephyr also, with his sweet breath, has inspired the tender crops in every wood and heather, and the young sun has run half of his course through the sign of the Ram, and little birds make melody who sleep all night with their eyes open (so Nature stimulates them in their hearts), then people desire to go on pilgrimages, and professional pilgrims desire to seek strange shores; and they wend their way, especially, from the end of every county in England to Canterbury, in order to seek the holy, blissful martyr who had helped them when they were sick. These opening lines juxtapose new words of French and Latin origin with roots and forms of Old English or Anglo-Saxon origin. We see French, for example, in perced, veyne, licour, and ﬂour (ﬂeur, ﬂower). The word vertu comes from Latin vir, meaning man; here, we interpret it as power. Combined with engendred, we get a sense of the power of regeneration in These opening the spring. Referring to the wind as Zephirus lines juxtapose new invokes a world of classical mythology. Note, words of French too, that with his sweet breath, Zephirus and Latin origin with inspires. This is perhaps the ﬁrst use of inspire as a verb meaning to breathe into. In addition roots and forms to French and Latin words, Chaucer uses of Old English or English vocabulary. Zephirus’s breath, for Anglo-Saxon origin. example, inspires into the holt and heeth. The smale foweles come from Old English, while melodye is ultimately a Latin term for music. Note, however, that the birds are sleeping with their eyes open (having sex) because nature has pricked their corages, from the French coeur (heart). In Chaucer’s time, as in our own, it seems that the language of love was French. 55 To summarize, the words in this poem for high-culture concepts—intellection, sexuality, courtliness, poetry, and imagination—are French, while the words for the landscape are English. In the ﬁnal couplet, we see the French word martir (martyr) enter the English language as an imported concept word, but the alliterative hem hath holpen seems to be a reassertion of English forms. The rhyming of the same word with two different meanings (seke [seek] and seeke [sick]) gives a sense of profound closure at the end of this ﬁrst sentence of The Canterbury Tales. In these opening lines, Chaucer has written the history of the English language to his time as we have sought to trace it: French and English jockeying for position, alliterative poetry reasserting itself, and an evocation of a larger classical way of thinking. Chaucer wrote in English, yet he brings the vocabulary of his trilingual world together in a profound synthesis of landscape and culture. Suggested Reading Benson, ed., The Riverside Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Cannon, The Making of Chaucer’s English. Lerer, ed., The Yale Companion to Chaucer. Questions to Consider 1. Could Chaucer have read “Caedmon’s Hymn” as it was originally written? Lecture 10: Chaucer’s English 2. What words in Chaucer’s vocabulary suggest that he was a cosmopolitan writer? 56 Li Dialect Representations in Middle English Lecture 11 When I was a child growing up in Brooklyn, I thought everybody spoke in dialect. There were the peppery Yiddishisms of my own family, the melliﬂuous Italian of the people down the block, the Russian in the recesses of the subways. I grew up in a world of dialects. … When I was a graduate student at Oxford University, I became aware of the fact that dialect was not simply a matter for the child in New York, but it was a historical problem as well. M iddle English is, one scholar has written, “par excellence the dialectical phase of English, in the sense that while dialects have been spoken at all periods, it was in Middle English that divergent local usage was normally indicated in writing.” Scribes in the medieval period in England invariably copied texts in their own regional dialects, giving scholars today valuable indications of pronunciation. As we saw in earlier lectures, regional dialect variation in the Anglo-Saxon period provoked national standardization. The Northumbrian dialect of “Caedmon’s Hymn,” for example, disappeared in the West Saxon forms of the translators in King Alfred’s court. Middle English had varieties of dialects, many of which had their own literary traditions. In looking at dialect in the works of Chaucer and other texts, we can see not simply how dialect is transcribed but how it is evoked—that is, the way in which dialect humor and representation can be used to express social satire or philosophical claims. t D Middle English had ﬁve major regional dialects that roughly corresponded to the Old English dialect differences. The dialect& boundaries were both natural and manmade. The major rivers of England made up boundaries of T - speech communities, as did the old Roman roads, which effectively divided - the country and, well into the Middle Ages, were still the central lines of & transportation through the island. The Northern dialect of Middle English was the language spoken north of the Humber River, in Northumbria. Its most distinctive features were a rich Scandinavian vocabulary and a set of sounds keyed to certain Scandinavian habits of pronunciation. The predominance & of sk- and k- sounds in Scandinavian (sh- and ch- in Old English) became 57 pronunciation can tell people from where ? distinctions between Northern and Southern English. Thus, in Northern English, we have kirk and skirt instead of Southern English church and shirt. O A set of vowel shifts was also important in marking the difference between Northern English and the dialects spoken in the south and the Midlands. The Old English long a vowel sound eventually become a long o sound in Southern and Midlands Middle English but was retained as a long a in the north. This distinctive difference would have been noticed by all readers and writers. O · The East Midland dialect was spoken in the eastern-central part of the country, broadly to the east of the old Roman north-south road that linked York and London. It was an important dialect because many Londoners came from the area. This dialect formed the basis of the major literary language of England at the close of the Studying such Middle Ages; much of Chaucer is written in the technical details East Midland dialect. enables us to draw The O West Midland dialect was spoken to the 3 dialect boundaries. west of the old Roman road and to the east of Lecture 11: Dialect Representations in Middle English the border with the Celtic-speaking area of Wales. Intellectual and literary activities in this region were centered in Chester, near modern-day Liverpool, and the Wirral Peninsula. The West Midland dialect had both different sounds and different morphology. One distinctive feature was that it used the Old English form for she as ha or heo, rather than the emerging form of she. Studying such technical details enables us to draw dialect boundaries. how ? The O ⑭ Southern dialect was spoken in the southwestern part of England, roughly corresponding to Wessex. Southern dialects sound more advanced& from our perspective; that is, they undergo certain sound changes that pass into standard Modern English pronunciation. The dialect’s distinctive feature * was the pronunciation of any initial s- and f- as z- and v-, respectively. Thus, & the Southern dialect preserves some distinctions that pass into Modern English: For example, the words for the male and female fox were vox and vixen in Southern English; the latter word is kept in Modern English. The ⑤ Kentish dialect spoken in the southeast of England was a distinctive form of speech well into the early Renaissance, preserving many Old English forms, 58 sounds, and words. Documents in Kentish also preserve the Old English case endings more than any other Middle English dialect. These Middle English dialects would have been recognizable as such in the Middle Ages. = How did literary writers represent regional variation in speech for purposes of humor or social commentary? Let’s explore Chaucer’s “Reeve’s Tale” = as an example of a dialect joke. Chaucer’s reeve, a medieval overseer of = seigniorial land, is a mean-spirited, slender, choleric man, who is also a carpenter. In The Canterbury Tales, he is responding to a story told by the miller about a carpenter. “The Reeve’s Tale” is about two students from the north of England who go to Cambridge University. In Cambridge, they buy their grain from a corrupt local miller and wind up sleeping with the miller’s wife and daughter. Chaucer emphasizes the fact that these scholars are from the north and speak in the Northern dialect. Chaucer evokes what his London audience would have recognized as Northern English with such words as na 3 instead of no and boes instead of best.3The students’ use of the phrase til and fra for to and fro highlights the absence of the vowel change (long a to long o) and the holdovers from Scandinavian mentioned earlier. The cacophony of I is as ill a millere as ar ye (“I am as bad a miller as you are”) would have painted the students as bumpkins. Contact The Northern English dialect inﬂuenced standard English with the- migration of people from the north to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and to the great city of London. One of Chaucer’s contemporaries, John of Trevisa, wrote that Northern English was scharp, slyttyng and frotyng, and unschape, that is, sharp, slitting, frotting (“scratching”), and unshapely. The proverb spoken by one of the students in “The Reeve’s Tale” emphasizes the sounds of the north once again: I have herd seyd, “Man sal taa of twa thynges/ Slyk as he fyndes, or taa slyk as he bringes.” (I have heard it said, “Of two · things, one should take/Such as he ﬁnds, or take such as he brings.”) Note the long a instead of long o and the k sound so characteristic of the north in slyk (such). In The Second Shepherd’s Play, we see that if the south could make fun of the north, the north could certainly make fun of the south. This play is the second of two about the shepherds who attended the birth of Jesus. Mak, a sheep- stealer, pretends to be a messenger from the king, using exaggerated Southern 59 dialect. In speaking to the northern shepherds, Mak uses the Southern Ich be, rather than the Northern I is, which would have been humorous to the northern English audience. He mixes in French words, such as presence and reverence, to emphasize his connection to the court in London. Ultimately, one of the northern shepherds tells Mak, Now take outt that Sothren to the / And sett in a torde! (Now take out your Southern tooth / And stick it in a turd!). In using a francophone vocabulary and recognizably Southern forms and pronunciations, Mak, the impersonator, serves as a commentary on southern pretense, as well as the Southern dialect. Keep in mind that these dialect renderings are not transcriptions of actual speech but evocations of what a given audience would expect certain people to sound like. They give us as much evidence about attitudes as they give us about sound. We’ll look further at attitudes toward language change and variation in the medieval world in our next lecture. Suggested Reading Baugh and Cable, A History of the English Language. Lecture 11: Dialect Representations in Middle English Benson, ed., The Riverside Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Milroy, “Middle English Dialectology.” Strang, A History of English. Questions to Consider 1. In the absence of mass media, would dialect variation likely have been greater in the Middle Ages than today? 2. What kinds of accents are caricatured in such Middle English texts as The Canterbury Tales and The Second Shepherd’s Play? 60

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