Chaucer's English persists as the English of today

Armilus

Banned
An example of Middle English as spoken in Chaucer's 14th century:

"Thou seist ful sooth, quod roger, by my fey sooth pley, quaad pley, as the flemyng seith of fustian he wered a gypon al bismotered with his habergeon, Ywympled wel, and on hir heed an hat girt with a ceint of silk, with barres smale. Hym wolde he snybben sharply for the nonys. A bettre preest I trowe that nowher noon ys. Hire gretteste ooth was but by seinte loy; and she was cleped madame eglentyne."

What scenario is plausible so that this early English would stay unchanged as the English of the Empire and the 21st century?

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"The English language is a sea which receives tributaries from every tongue under heaven" (Emerson).
 
Armilus said:
"Thou seist ful sooth, quod roger, by my fey sooth pley, quaad pley, as the flemyng seith of fustian he wered a gypon al bismotered with his habergeon, Ywympled wel, and on hir heed an hat girt with a ceint of silk, with barres smale. Hym wolde he snybben sharply for the nonys. A bettre preest I trowe that nowher noon ys. Hire gretteste ooth was but by seinte loy; and she was cleped madame eglentyne."
Um, WTF? :confused: Could someone translate that?
 
I was wondering that myself.

Here's what I can make of it:

"You say for sure, good Roger, by my fey should play, quaad play, as the flaming seith of Fustian he wered a girl(?) al bismotered with his habergeon, dimpled(?) well, on her head a hat girt with a scarf(?) of silk, [and] a barres smile. Him would he snybben sharply for the nonys. A better priest I trowe that nowhere none is. Hir greatest ooth was but by seinte joy(?); and she was cleped Madame Eglentyne."

:eek: :confused:
 
Armilus said:
An example of Middle English as spoken in Chaucer's 14th century:

"Thou seist ful sooth, quod roger, by my fey sooth pley, quaad pley, as the flemyng seith of fustian he wered a gypon al bismotered with his habergeon, Ywympled wel, and on hir heed an hat girt with a ceint of silk, with barres smale. Hym wolde he snybben sharply for the nonys. A bettre preest I trowe that nowher noon ys. Hire gretteste ooth was but by seinte loy; and she was cleped madame eglentyne."

What scenario is plausible so that this early English would stay unchanged as the English of the Empire and the 21st century?

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"The English language is a sea which receives tributaries from every tongue under heaven" (Emerson).

Have the Dark Ages last until the 20th century! Seriously, once you have technological progress your language HAS to change to include the new concepts if nothing else.
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
My old mentor used to describe the linguistic situation in the Arab world by asking us to imagine if we were required to master the language of Beowulf for the purposes of reading and writing - indeed, any education whatsoever - and that all media were inaccessible to those who had not mastered Anglo-Saxon. In this scenario, the English language had moved on - as inevitably it must - but the standard had been artificially frozen at the 9th century.

One way to ensure that Chaucer's English is preserved is to make it a prestige language and somehow downgrade French and Latin. An independent English Church might be the first step towards this.
 

Grey Wolf

Gone Fishin'
Donor
Language is a funny thing. We think it has developed but in general what it has done is one of the following :-

1. Added words from other languages ('The Peshawar Lancers' shows just how many of these come from India, for example)

2. Verbified nouns and nounified verbs etc

3. Contracted or corrupted words, so that they do not resemble the original but mean more or less the same

4. Invented new words for new things - in English this has been done by borrowing Greek or Latin roots and adding to them, hence radio, television, automobile. I believe other languages try to 'explain' them using combinations of native words - John's explanation of modern Turkish seemed to imply this

Chaucer's English was not a stand-still language. It had developed over centuries, it had borrowed words from other languages, and it had corruptions and contractions of its own. It is not logical that English would suddenly and inexplicably stop there

Even if you shut England up in the 14th century in some time-hole, without foreign inter-action, at the very least the contraction/corruption and the verb/noun aspect would continue to occur

I can't think of a POD where a LIVING language would stay the same

Grey Wolf
 
You can still understand the 400 years old shakespear rather easily. this is only 200 more years, obviously something happened to english during this period of time.
 
well- it kinda helps with Greece being quite patriotic against years of foreign invasion and Iceland stuck up North without any outside influence....
 

Grey Wolf

Gone Fishin'
Donor
tom said:
What about Greek and Icelandic? Those changed a lot less as well.

What was Phanariot Greek like ? I would have assumed it had bought in a lot of foreign words. This is the TRUE Greek of a lingustic evolution.

The reborn Greek of the reborn kingdom was an artificial re-invention and re-standardisation

Grey Wolf
 
Why did the English language change?

Peter said:
You can still understand the 400 years old shakespear rather easily. this is only 200 more years, obviously something happened to english during this period of time.

First, it should be pointed out that pronuciation of words in Middle English is not really that much different than it was in Shakespeare's time. The spelling was wildly different, but that was because standard rules of spelling had not yet evolved.

There were changes in the language between the time of Chaucer and the time of Shakespeare, of course. The answer to why this happened is simple...It happened because the Renaissance happened. The Renaissance was a time of great change in the English language. The influence of the printing press meant that the language became more standardized. This was very important because there were several dialects of English in Chaucer's time, probably descended from the original Anglish, Saxon, Jutish, and Norse root languages, and these were almost not mutually intelligible in many cases. Printers, wanting to produce only one version of the books they were producing, settled on one dialect...as it happened, different from the one Chaucer used, which accounts for much of the difference in vocabulary between Shakespeare and Chaucer...and that became "standard" English. There was also a great explosion of new words being added to the language, primarily from Greek and Latin roots, sometimes new words for concepts not already found in English, but often replacing older words with Germanic (i.e. Old English) roots. In large part this was done on purpose..."scholars" of the time felt that English was a "base" tongue, and Greek and Latin were "noble" languages. This process of creatively adding new words continued right up until Samuel Johnson composed the first Dictionary, when it largely stopped.
 
The Great Vowel Shift

You're wrong about the pronunciation. In Chaucer's time, long vowels were pronounced 'continental-style'. 'Dream' was pronounced 'dray-am', 'oo' was a long 'o' sound, while 'ou' was pronounced as in French.

By Shakespeare's time, English pronunciation was similar to modern American English pronunciation (yes the unrounded 'o' in American 'stop' is actually a 17th-Centuryism!), with current British pronunciation evolving in the 18th and 19th centuries.
 
Language has periods of slow linear change and periods of fast non-linear change.

Small changes can build up and then their combination leads to a period of rapid change. For example, over centuries lets say the ends of words slowly become underpronounced. If however, the ends of the words mark noun case, this may then lead at some point to a large change in syntax as this case information is lost. This may lead a language to change from a rather free word order language to one with a strict word order with word order marking the agent/patient roles whereas before case had marked these.

The phonological reduction of have in English in conditionals e.g. I would have, such that it is indistinguishable from of will probably lead at some point in the future to would of being the standard form.

Language changes more slowly often in backward places (e.g. non-standard dialects preserving old forms) or where there is another prestige language used by the ruling class (e.g. Czech). So a backward England run by French speaking aristos might lead to a language less changed from that of Chaucer.
 
To have more of a ye olde English I'd say the way to go is have the Vikings totally conquer England and hold it so it becomes part of the viking world.
In northern England we speak more of a 'real' sort of English with our influences coming from the norse languages which are from the same Germanic family as English whilst in the south they recieved their influences from French which is latin.
Its impossible to have it identical though you can keep it similar.
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
mishery said:
Language changes more slowly often in backward places (e.g. non-standard dialects preserving old forms) or where there is another prestige language used by the ruling class (e.g. Czech). So a backward England run by French speaking aristos might lead to a language less changed from that of Chaucer.
Yes, but these backward places are almost always isolated and fairly free of foreign influence. Islands are good candidates - Sardinia, Malta, Socotra and so on - but French rule in Britain is bound to cause some changes. The language of jurisprudence, for example, is overwhelmingly French and Latinate. The Great Vowel Shift, which George Carty mentioned, covered the continent and hopped across the channel, affecting practically every Germanic language. I would imagine that it would still happen in this instance.

Mountains are another good place for unusual dialects to survive - for example, the Caucasus, or the constellation of Aramaic dialects that have clung to the mountains of the Middle East, like islands in a sea of Arabic. The dialect I'm documenting right now, which is the oldest surviving attested dialect of Aramaic, and substantially the same as the dialect of the Babylonian Talmud, found a home in the foothills of the Zagros, where it remained for centuries before being expelled by Muslim marauders. Now it's on its way out, the home villages (Shushtar, Dezful, Shawali) having been depleted of Mandaeans.

I can only imagine Chaucer's English surviving in a diglossic situation. His dialect would have to become prestigious, and would be artificially frozen as it was in his day. Other English dialects would continue to develop, influenced by French and every other language under the sun, but in this scenario Chaucer's English would remain pure (the phonology would probably change, as it has in Icelandic, but the writing system would not reflect this). The spelling would be standardized and a literature in Chaucerian English would develop.
 
I remember reading that English underwent a period of exceptionally great change from the mid-16th through the late 17th centuries. There was much more change in that period in the basic language than there has been in the last 300 years. That's why Shakespeare's English is very different from Chaucer's, but also quite different from ours, whereas English from the early 18th century onward is pretty easy to understand apart from some changes in vocabulary.
 
Leo - modern written Arabic is really that different from modern spoken Arabic? That strikes me as kind of bizarre. Does it have to do with written Arabic being heavily based on the Quran and other writings from early Islamic history that have so much prestige that it would be unacceptable to "translate" them into a more modern idiom?
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
Paul Spring said:
Leo - modern written Arabic is really that different from modern spoken Arabic? That strikes me as kind of bizarre. Does it have to do with written Arabic being heavily based on the Quran and other writings from early Islamic history that have so much prestige that it would be unacceptable to "translate" them into a more modern idiom?
Modern written Arabic is tied to the standard of Classical Arabic, with some major differences (predominantly in vocabulary and syntax). However, the differences between the spoken dialects and the written one (note the singular) are vast. So much so that Arabic is considered to be an arcane language even among those who speak it natively.

No one - and I mean no one - speaks in daily life the way people speak on the television or the way that newspapers are written. I don't think anyone really did. The standard of Arabic is artificially high and may even be artificial in nature - some have suggested that the Arabic of the Qur'an is based upon a tribal koine which was subsequently processed and standardized by the grammarians. Certainly the orthography of the Qur'an reveals important differences between the dialect of Muhammad and Classical Arabic as it is received (they are not the same).
 
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