How do we know how Chaucer sounded?

October 10, 2005 1:18 PM

There seems to be a consensus on how Chaucer and his contemporaries sounded. What I'd like is a summary (or links, or pointers to resources) of how we know how Middle English speakers sounded.
posted by everichon to writing & language (7 comments total)

do a search on some key words at languagelog.org, they had a few articles about it before.
Basically, by looking at how words rhyme, you get hints at how certain words might have been pronounced. By plugging in information from other languages contemporary to the one you are studying, looking at how languages are related, what words are borrowed, etc. etc. etc., you can divine with some certainty how things were pronounced.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 1:45 PM on October 10, 2005

poetry is also extremely helpful in this regard because you know where the intonation is automatically.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 1:46 PM on October 10, 2005

everichon, err.. the tag should be spelt 'pedantry'.
posted by Gyan at 1:49 PM on October 10, 2005

I'm afraid that I can't help you with the particular case of Middle English, but you might be able to infer some of the principles involved by reading about the Pronouncing Shakespeare project and book. This was a short run at The Globe in London. Under the guidance of David Crystal (a linguist), the actors performed Romeo and Juliet and Troilus and Cressida in OP (original pronunciation).

Here's a New Yorker article and the transcript from an A(ustralian)BC interview, and here's an interview with the an actor featuring samples of the speech, and here are some more clips. To me it sounds like very odd west country.

The ABC article is the most useful in working out the linguists' methods. It seems to be based on spelling in the original folios, meter of the verse, lines that should rhyme and don't any more, and contemporary descriptions of speech. I don't know how many of these methods would be useful for analysis of The Cantebury Tales though.
posted by caek at 2:00 PM on October 10, 2005

the tag should be spelt 'pedantry'


*hangs head in shame*
posted by everichon at 2:03 PM on October 10, 2005

Forgive me, as I finished my English degree a long while ago and have not had need to use this knowledge for a long time....

The Great Vowel Shift gives clues. Before the GVS, English vowels used the Latin alphabet. So they were pronounced differently, especially the long vowels. (http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/vowels.html)

BuddhainaBucket is also right about rhyme and poetry. This is sort of like filling in the blanks. We can compare Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to much earlier works like Beowulf, Caedmon's History of Creation or The Dream of the Rood, or much later works by, say, Shakespeare. As the Harvard link above notes, people started standardizing English spelling and pronounciation by the 1500s or so, so we can look at that for a reference. (The rise of mercantilism called for standardization to facilitate trade.)

However, of great importance is The Ormulun. Orm, who wrote the Ormulun, actually noted that he hated people who misprounounced English. So he spelling many words phonetically. This gives us many clues and is probably one of the most significant linguistic pieces in the history of the English language.

So, in short, the answer lies in earlier poetry, Ormulun, knowledge of the Great Vowel Shift, and later poetry and phonetic dictionaries.
posted by acoutu at 11:12 PM on October 10, 2005

Acoutu makes a fair point about the Ormulum (as it is spelt) although the idiosyncratic nature of the author's spelling system (he frequently doubles up consonants for no discernable reason) makes the evidence difficult to assess. The Ormulum is from Peterborough too, and the East Anglian area is noted for an unusual form of pronunciation. A good introduction to general ME spelling and pronunciation may be found in "An Introduction to Middle English" by Horobin and Smith, esp. pp. 26-63. If you would like more specifically academic books, I'll put some bibliograhy at the end of this post. Essentially, ME was pronounced quite a lot like the contemporary north Midlands accent. The roots of this are traceable from the shifts in spelling between Old English and Middle English. The Great Vowel Shift is only one of the major transitions, all of which are detailed in "A Guide to Old English" by Mitchell and Robinson.
As caek says above, internal evidence of meter and rhyme are useful in attempting to trace pronunciation. A clear example of this is the stressed final -e, present in Chaucer and frequently used as a rhyming line ending; modern final -e is unstressed, hence we can work out a difference. The most useful evidence, however, comes from tracing modern spelling's origins and comparing contemporary pronunciation with that. This obviously varies from area to area and dialect to dialect, and Chaucer's London 1380-1400 English is discernably different from, say, Richard Rolle's Yorkshire language of 1330s and 40s, or Langland's Midlands' poetry of 1370s-1390s. Chaucer's pronunciation orginates in a complex admixture of Wessex Anglo-Saxon and Anglian (with Norse influence) Anglo-Saxon, a process largely facilitated by population shift and the spread of Wessex texts in 1100s.
Bibliograhy: The specific area of interest to you is phonology, the study of sound changes. See Heinz, "English phonology: an Introduction", McMahon, "An Introduction to English Phonology", Hogg's essay 'Phonology' in ed. Hogg, "The Cambidge History of the English Language vol. 1", and Lass, "Phonology". For an overview of language change in general, see Hogg's volume op.cit., and Barber, "The English Language."
posted by Hermit at 11:31 AM on October 11, 2005