WI: No Chaucer

What if Chaucer somehow died in childhood due to Black Death or some other disease? How would the development of English be affected by his non-prescence?
 
Did Chaucer have any part in his sister-in-law's career? If so, the Beauforts and therefore the Tudors never come into being..
 
The literary heritage of English is likely much less rich. Chaucer has virtually never not been popular, so the careers of later authors from Skelton to Shakespeare and Spenser will be affected too. Assuming minimal butterflies, the leading lights of English literature of the 1380's-1400's will most likely be Langland and Gower, so English verse of this period has a decidedly moralistic and didactic bent.

I'm not sure how the absence of Chaucer affects the development of the English language, but he was pretty important in introducing French and Italian poetic models into English; that has to include at least some loan words and coinages that won't exist in an ATL. The London/southeast dialect Chaucer wrote in still probably becomes the standard for literary English, though; it has numbers on its side with or without him.
 
English as a language continues to be seen as an illegitimate language of the peasant class, and French might continue to be the premier language of the English crown even longer.
 
Did Chaucer have any part in his sister-in-law's career? If so, the Beauforts and therefore the Tudors never come into being..

No he was a court writer but was no where near influential enough for his disappearance to hurt them. Butterflies on the other hand...


English as a language continues to be seen as an illegitimate language of the peasant class, and French might continue to be the premier language of the English crown even longer.


Not at all. There have been a few studies of this and all the evidence suggests that English became the dominant language for a class roughly one generation after them became purely English focused. So for the Knights and most minor lords English became dominant during at the end of the 12th century a generation after the Stephen and the Anarchy had forced them to pick England or Normandy and sever ties between the two. For the Barons it the division came with the John and his loss of Normandy and English thus took over during the mid 13th century. For the magnates and high nobility it came during the Hundred Years War, while for the Court it was after Henry IV took over and his son Henry V became the first primarily English speaking monarch since the Conquest.
The big change the absence of Chaucer would cause would a different dialect of English might become "standard". As long as the court spoke French or Norman all the various dialects were equal, but once the Court adopted Chaucer's London style English it became dominant and in due course the English language was standardised around it. Now in all likelihood London English is the most likely to become standard as the spoken version but having a Yorkshireman or a West Countryman as the "father" of written English would have an enormous difference on how things are spelt. Spelling would still evolve until mass literacy during the Enlightenment (whenever that happens) causes the standardisation of spelling, but spelling would be evolving from a different base if someone had been that base.
 
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