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?”)
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.
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".
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
"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.
Confession: I have always had a hard time telling Jason Bateman and Nathan Fillion apart. Maybe it's the hair? The put-upon but loveable comedic style? Their tendency to be in TV shows with bad ratings and cult followings?
Ok but Teen Wolf Too is (loosely) based on my dad (not him being a werewolf though, so don't get excited, sorry). Therefore it is clearly better than the one based on my uncle, and also I can never be attracted to Jason Bateman, no matter how great a boyfriend he would be.
I recently realized almost every actor who was on AD is forever their character from AD to me, regardless of what they did before and after (exceptions apply for Julia Louis-Dreifus and Charlize Theron, but that's it). I'm happy with that.
