In Chaucer's language, the inflectional endings (- e, - ed, - en, - es) were pronounced in almost all cases. Those changes are apparent in the following chart, which also provides a guide to the pronunciation of Chaucer's "long vowels":įor Chaucer's poetry, the most important difference between Chaucer's language and our own is due to the fact that in the change from Middle to Modern English the language lost the inflectional or "final e". Between Middle English times and our own day, all of the long vowels changed in pronunciation in a regular manner, called The Great Vowel Shift. These changes in the pronunciation of the "long vowels" are due to what is called The Great Vowel Shift. And the Middle English short vowels are very similar to those in Modern English (Chaucer's "short a" was more like the sound in "rot" than in modern "rat.") But the the Middle English "long" vowels are regularly and strikingly different from our modern forms. The consonants remain generally the same, though Chaucer rolled his Rs, sometimes dropped his Hs, and pronounced both elements of consonant combinations (such as in "knight"or in "write") that were later simplified ( and ). The main difference between Chaucer's language and our own is in the pronunciation of the "long" vowels. English was once again becoming the language of the royal court and of the new literature produced by Chaucer and his contemporaries. In Chaucer's time this was changing, and in his generation English regained the status it had enjoyed in Anglo-Saxon times, before the Normans came. After the conquest, French largely displaced English as the language of the upper classes and of sophisticated literature. The Idea of the Vernacular will be an invaluable asset not only to Middle English survey courses but to courses in English literary and cultural history and courses on the history of literary theory.Middle English is the form of English used in England from roughly the time of the Norman conquest (1066) until about 1500. The book includes a substantial glossary that constitutes the first mapping of the language and terms of Middle English literary theory. They open windows onto late medieval debates on women's and popular literacy, on the use of the vernacular for religious instruction or Bible translation, on the complex metaphorical associations contained within the idea of the vernacular, and on the cultural and political role of the "courtly" writing associated with Chaucer and his successors.īesides the excerpts, the book contains five essays that propose new definitions of medieval literary theory, discuss the politics of Middle English writing, the relation of medieval book production to notions of authorship, and the status of the prologue as a genre, and compare the role of the medieval vernacular to that of postcolonial literatures. Taken together, the excerpts show how vernacular texts reflected and contributed to the formation of class, gender, professional, and national identity. The excerpts fall into three groups, illustrating the strategies used by medieval writers to establish their cultural authority, the ways they constructed audiences and readerships, and the models they offered for the process of reading. It edits, introduces, and glosses some sixty excerpts, all of which reflect on the problems and opportunities associated with writing in the "mother tongue" during a period of revolutionary change for the English language. This pioneering anthology of Middle English prologues and other excerpts from texts written between 12 is one of the largest collections of vernacular literary theory from the Middle Ages yet published and the first to focus attention on English literary theory before the sixteenth century.
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