Old, Middle, Modern: Chaucer as the turning-point in the story of English pronunciation

it's a delight to be here to be in Dulwich except I'm not I have to say I've never been into so many people's homes at the same time in my entire life it's amazing this technology isn't it what you're seeing here is my study here in my home in Holly Head in North Wales and I'm glad I'm here because outside it's raining like crazy like it does so often in this part of the world but I see some of you have got a bit of Sun hit here and there how can that be that's amazing so anyway thank you for the invitation John yes a talk you asked for on Chaucer but then I thought you're never going to talk about Chaucer and its pronunciation in particular we have to put them into context and so in the end I thought well let's do a talk which looks at the way in which pronunciation has moved over the centuries from the beginning until the present day and then we'll see how Chaucer has this absolutely crucial role in the middle right bang in the middle of this of this amazing trend so yes talk for about I've never done this talk before so I don't exactly know how long it's going to be and also I want you to have a go at some of the sounds so that might slow things down a little bit I won't be able to hear you but at least you'll be able to practice a little bit as we go along so to begin at the beginning as somebody once said and when was the beginning of English and of course it's Old English the language of the anglo-saxons which runs from about 600 or so ad I mean they arrived 449 ad but there isn't anything written down until about the 7th century and it goes on it's all about the 11th century and that's the period we call Old English and then there's a kind of lull and we get into a period called middle English in which Chaucer is right bang in the middle round about 1400 and then there's another transitional period and we get to the period called early modern English which is where Shakespeare reigns supreme and that goes on from you know roundabouts the early 15th century to the 1700s and then you get the modern English period from roughly dr. Johnson's time to the present day now here's a tip when you're studying these periods of English don't go to the literature first the famous literature first because that will almost certainly put you off it's difficult I mean if we start with Old English Beowulf for instance well that's not easy if we start even with Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales that isn't all that easy if we start with some of Shakespeare's very complicated language that's not so easy no no as much better way of getting into the history of English and that's to start with some of the lesser-known texts that are actually really quite intelligible even in Old English now to illustrate this point let me begin with a difficult text in Old English let's begin with with Bill what have I got here the the opening of the beloved poem you know the long long dramatic epic narrative that nobody knows exactly when it was created but it was certainly recorded and around about you know ten hundred the early 11th century anyway and it begins does probably many of you have read from one of the translations with the poet saying lo hey listen everybody cracked he says where you got dinner in your dog on fear and tuning a through your food on who the other Lingus Ellen frem Adan when you go oh yeah right well thank you I mean nobody can understand that take it word by word but lo way ah that's like modern English we we got of dinner got a spear guard in our den na Danes we spear Danes in in that's the same as modern English yeah Dharam in days doggone days year of your days of your in olden days and it goes on like that whoo traveling us Ellen feminine huzzah Hauser Avila gasps addling you've probably heard ethylene meaning Prince or leader or something like that ed with the ethylene for instance l encourage ramadan accomplished it so the sentence means let's listen to the tales of the old danes from ancient times how the tribal Kings got glory how they did noble deeds and that's what it means but I read it in full difficult isn't it what way gardener in yard ah whom they are cleaning a throne Jeroen on who the other Lingus l then free me done well it's a foreign language basically not because of the grammar because the grammar is actually very close to that of modern English English grammar has changed a lot but there are some sentences in Old English that are exactly the same as in modern English as we'll see in a minute not particularly because of the pronunciation it's because of the words the vocabulary there's so much Germanic vocabulary in here that is completely lost we don't know what it means at all but a little later down about the tenth or eleventh line of Beowulf they talked about an old English King an English actor Germanic King and the poet says he was a good king that was God Kooning he says that was God Kooning that was a good King and suddenly we're almost in modern English country that was-- is exactly the same as it is today now you don't start with bales because those sentences like that was gold cunning only turn up every now and again most of it is impenetrable i remember when i studied it at University when I was an undergraduate it took ages to really master Old English and learn the vocabulary it was like learning a foreign language so you start with something easier in Old English and the place I always like to start with is the first recorded English conversation it's called Alfred cheese colloquy here it is this is this is the book I used when I was an undergraduate look at the spelling of Al fridge there al fridge the AE at the beginning it's a colloquy a conversation again 11th century it's a description written by somebody we don't quite know who how for each yes but in reason up he was a bishop but when habit really I suppose when you say and we don't quite know who translated it into English because the original text which was in Latin had an intelligent transportation written into one of the manuscripts and that's how we know it in Old English who don't quite know who did that it's conversation between a teacher and his students teaching them Latin of course and it begins by the teacher saying write what you want to learn them the kids say or the students say Oh teach us what you like teacher we want to learn once we learn would you like to be beaten to be learned so yes we'd rather be beaten and not learn at all Thank You teacher I mean you know really olden times this I suppose anyway the point is he then teaches them by going round various occupations and he says let's imagine that you're a fisherman you're a hunter you're whatever and here's a little bit of the dialogue and he says to somebody you know is that one of your companions is that of the new year Ferrum and the man replies yeah he is yeah he is I mean that that's exactly like modern English yeah even ye a can steal anything do you know how to do anything can't do anything Annie and craft ditch come and craft can I can do one type of work and a craft each I can know how to do you Ken you know the same as in Scottish English which says the teacher witch hunter HM hunter hmm hunter I am am I am cross whose changes the Kings ooh little dialogue is exactly like a conversation in modern English and most of the words are reasonably intelligible with just a little bit of glossing it's a totally different world isn't it from the world and beetles so that illustrates my points that if you go to the big literature first you're likely going to find it very off-putting unless you're really enthusiastic to get inside it and do all the hard work but if you go to some of the lesser-known texts then actually you find that Old English is not so difficult as you thought it might be I am it Jam try it it jail I am and there you go that's your first lesson in Old English now the same point applies when you get into Chaucer because if you go to the Canterbury Tales for instance as you were planning to do well yes it's it's a different world it's a much more intelligible world but it's still quite tricky I mean I've got here my oh my complete works of Chaucer Robinson's Edition which again I got when I was an undergraduate and look how thick it is I mean this is all the works of Chaucer but the last half of the book is glossary you know what four different words mean and all the rest of it it is an awful lot of vocabulary in Chaucer that's tricky to understand but that's in the literary section if you go to some of the prose works it's much much easier so I take as my example here the treatise on the astrolabe the device which Chaucer wants to teach to his son and he talks to his son and it goes like this and I'll do it in medieval pronunciation which we'll talk about in a minute but he won't have too much difficulty understanding it little Lewis Misun little Louis with son little Louis misunder yeah per se well by certain evidences the inability to learn the sciences to check numerous and proportions I perceive well by certain evidence late it by certain evidences the inability to learn Sciences touching numbers and proportions this trait is divided in favor parties will I show the under fully licked rules enacted words in English for Latin they can snow you would smile me little son you own you can't do Latin much my little son you don't know much Latin yet for Latin account so you would smile you only know a little smile smile little me little son and it goes on like this and every now and then you get some technical terminology but on the whole it's a very colloquial natural style and the pronunciation doesn't get too much in the way I hope and we'll go into that in just a moment but the most noticeable difference with Old English of course is that the vocabulary is now much more familiar there might be a couple of words that you know it's difficulty with but it's intelligible because of what happened and what happened was 1066 we get beaten up in come the French a French scribes take over and immediately the language changes they go against the Old Germanic vocabulary they don't like it they don't use it they replace it with French words something like thirty thousand French words come into English in that first couple of hundred years of French rule and it carries on like that into Chaucer's time and so suddenly the vocabulary becomes much more transparent compared with the old English vocabulary which was so opaque so when you're starting to read Chaucer it does feel like a familiar world compared with Old English and so this is the place where one can now start introducing the subject introducing a text of country tales or whatever it might be to people without worrying too much about the need for translation even though of course there will be a certain amount of vocabulary that will need glossing so let me take now the beginning of The Canterbury Tales and we're going to look at it in a little bit of detail because I want you all to at the end of it feel that you could say it in a medieval way reasonably close ugly reasonably confidently and when I do something in an early reconstruction of pronunciation of course the question that comes into your mind straight away is how do you know how do you do it and the answer is well you look at the evidence and the evidence is four kinds of evidence when you're reconstructing earlier pronunciation the first thing you look at if you're lucky enough to have them you don't have them so much in Old English would you do in Middle English if you look at the rhymes the rhymes that don't work in modern English that must have worked in a period friend Rhine was so important and then you look at the puns which a writer might make Shakespeare will see uses them a lot Chaucer not so much but you look at the puns because they can be evidence to the pun doesn't work in modern English and it did work in olden times that gives you some evidence as well thirdly and most important of all as far as Chaucer is concerned you look at the Spelling's because spelling wasn't standardized in shores as time and Nene wasn't in Shakespeare's time neither standard spelling you all know about standard spelling because we all had to learn it and the poor kids still have to learn it and it takes an age and only since the 18th century has this notion of correct spelling of a standard English spelling being part of all our lives before that people spelt more or less as they wanted to and nobody would tell them off so in Shakespeare's time even there's a huge amount of spelling variation and in Chaucer's time even more so people spelt as they spoke and will see that coming to life in just a few moments and then fourthly you read what is written at the time by people who describe pronunciation this is very important when we get to Shakespeare Chaucer not so much but an awful lot of people do over the centuries you know talk about the way in which people pronounce their words and sentences in a contemporaneous sort of way so that the four kinds of evidence then the rhymes the puns the Spelling's and the commentary that people make and you put all that together and you reconstruct never 100% one can never be absolutely certain you know the best you can do the best guess that you can do and one of the things you have to remember is that at any period in the history of English there were innumerable dialects and accents of course and so just because you reconstruct one accent doesn't mean to say that if you did it in a different accent it wouldn't just be just as plausible and indeed this evening what you're hearing is a reconstruction of Chaucer through the accent of David Crystal and any one of you watching listening if you were to do it you're gonna hit you're so through your accent as well well that's fine there would have been we know there were many many accents in those days and we know it because of the spelling variations and indeed in the Reeves tale we get this perfect example where Chaucer tells the story of a Miller who's trying to get the corn from a Cambridge College without fraudulently and a couple of students go down to sort him out and they arrive and the students talk to the Miller and Chaucer gives them different accents and it's the first time in English literature we see different accents being used in that way and the students come down from the north they got northern accents and the Miller has a southern accent and how do we know because choices spells them differently so he takes a word like go geo in modern English and indeed geo or G double O in Chaucer's time presumably something like go and the students spell the word GA presumably something like gah which of course you still get these days up north in Yorkshire in places I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gone I'm gone you know that sort of accent so go and God written by Chaucer so you look at the Spelling's in that way so let's look at the opening of The Canterbury Tales which I choose because it's you know the most famous I suppose really of the whole thing and let me first of all read it in a modern English accent to stress the differences and then in Chaucer's accent or one of the accents that might have been used at the time when that April with it no it doesn't work in modern English at all does it really well not April with his showers sweet the draught of March of Pierce to the root I mean it's immediately you see the rinds not working and bathed every vein in such liquor of which virtue engendered is the flower liquor flower none of the rhymes are working at all when Zephyrus equal his sweet breath inspired hath in every Holton Heath none of the rhymes work or hardly any of them now I can't do it I just can't do it Wanda that grill with his shawl assaulter the draft of March of pursuit or the rota unbothered every vein in swich lagoon of which virtue engendered is the floor Kwanza Farrow sake with his weight the breath in spirit hath been every halt and health the tendrá croppers and the younger son having the ramus outer core serum and smile a fool is mark and melody at sleep in our Linney with Albany so prick of him nurture in here garages and lung and folk to gone on pilgrimages now it's lovely the rhymes on work now is fantastic let's look at it word by word Kuan for friend and if you want to read it along with me you'll say the words along with me please do so fun that one that are thrill April today ah trill that's why it's spelt with an a because it used to be pronounced ah with his shoulders his showers sewers salt salt sweet salt the draw of March draw hurt the hurt sound of course that's why all those G H es are in English these days because they used to be pronounced with a what's technically called a velar fricative the hurt sound towards the back of the mouth as in Welsh we have it round here in Welsh all the time back and in Scots law as well the hurts and the drop of March March March you can trill it if you like barrage the are was pronounced all hours are pronounced after the vowel right up to Shakespeare's time and beyond half pair said have pierced after said to the road to the route to the road and bothered bathed bothered now have you noticed April April bathed bothered notice the relationship anything with an A in is likely to come out with an R and bothered every vine vein dying in switch Nicole switch such switch Nicole of which where to that Q virtue but Chuck sound comes in much later in English this is the influence of friendship cause engendered that's almost the same and Jen it engendered the short vowels don't change very much you'll notice this do you remember the old English example that was too short wells that was they haven't changed engendered and gentle unchanged is the floor floor flower floor Quan there's one again when zephyra's eek eek egg with his sweater breath sweet breath in spirit in spirit half in every halt and hair Compton hair the tendrá croppers who notice that croppers cro double p es double P and the consonant is lengthened a bit croppers not croppers croppers and the younger son younger son nothing around his house half the L pronounced not half as it is today course run and smile at fools small fouls mark and melody melody that's sleepin sleepin ah ah the NICHD there's another one another sound the knee with open e i will open i with open ear so brick of hem not you're not you're not nature there's that sound again you see doesn't happen in those days you can have not cured in here garages then longan lung and the g pronounced london Foulke Foulke with the l pronounced remember as we had earlier on to the elk announced to gone on pilgrim jeez you're getting into the hang of it if you want we'll say it once more and please do speak it in with me as best you can if you'd like to I'll say it slowly one that are thrilled with his sure assaulter the truth of March hath perced to the road and bothered every vine in swich Laocoon of which virtue and gendereth is the floor Kwanzaa Pharaoh's egg with his sweet breath in spirit hath in every hope and head the tendrá croppers and the younger son - the RAM his health curse Iran and small the fullness mark and meludia that sleep in Al the neck with open yet so picot hem not cure in here garages and long and thought the goal non pilgrimage is to make Humpty Dumpty tongue and put some emphases and do it of course when you're doing it properly but that's all it is and there are rules here rules in which you can sort of work out predict almost the nature of the sound that's going to turn up as I've told you already this the short vowel stay pretty well the same most of the consonants are the same it's the long vowels and the diphthongs the vowels with two qualities in that changed so much and here's a little mnemonic if you like in which you can work this out stupid sentence so it is time to see the shoes on the same feet now crazy sentence but so was saw it is time was team to see was say the shoes was shows on the same was sad Essam feet was fate now was new so it is time to see the shoes on the same feet now so it is teamed to say the shows on the psalm feets new she got it the idea in other words anything with an O in it is all anything with an Ian it has time with an I in it as in time is team anything with an e like to see to say the shoes the shows the same Sam and movie have got just before April Apple and so on feet was fate now is new so it is team to say the shows on the psalm fate new is it if you sort of practice it a little bit with translating it if you like into modern English and then going back and substituting the middle English sound now finally you've covered a fair number of the differences between how Middle English was pronounced and modern English was pronounced so the next question is why did it change and of course nobody really knows why why things change in pronunciation its whole variety of reasons to do with the way people move about and the influences they have on one another and so on but something critical happened just after Chaucer was around the phonologists the people who study the history of sounds call it the great vowel shift it's a shift in the pronunciation those vowels that I just told you about so it is time to see the shoes all of those changed between Chaucer's time and Shakespeare's time that's when the bulk of the changes took place took a hundred years or more for those changes to operate but within two to three generations the choice of pronunciation had shifted into the pronunciation will associate with Shakespeare in a few so it's so that probably grandparents and grandchildren might have had some difficulty understanding each other at the time certainly the great-grandchildren would the great vowel shift nobody quite knows why it happened one vowel shifted and pushed another one that pushed another one something like that took place but certainly within a very short period of time in the history of English the long vowels and the diphthongs changed their quality so that by Shakespeare's time we're in a vowel system that is much closer to modern English in fact when you hear Shakespeare in original pronunciation you're not really gonna have any trouble at all you'll understand it straight away again you might have the occasional difficult word and the occasional odd word order because of the metre of a poem or something like that but the pronunciation isn't going to get into the get you into difficulties in the way that you have to sort of learn it in the context of Chaucer or Olde English and to illustrate that let me do a little bit of early modern English now a little bit of Shakespeare if we take for example the opening lines of henry v where the chorus comes to the front of the stage and apologizes to everybody that they have to put this play on because we've only got a few actors here and we're trying to reconstruct the Battle of Agincourt how are we going to do that he says oh if only we had a muse of fire Oh for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention a kingdom for a stage Prince's to act and monarchs to behold the swelling scene then should the warlike Harry like himself assumed the port of Mars and that his heels leashed in like hounds should famine sword and fire crouch for employment well modern English holding in shakespeare's english all for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention a kingdom for a stage Prince's to act and monarchs to behold the swelling scene then should the warlike re like himself assume the port Amar's and that is heels laced in the gowns should come in sword and fire crouch for employment no you know nobody will have difficulty understanding that when that accent was being put on stage at the globe in 2004 in London I mean everybody understood it I know because I used to go around the audience and I'd ask them are you following this ok and they would say yeah fine you know it's and everybody said you know we speak like that where I come from people people and recognized parts of the accent you see not the whole thing of course but parts of it so you know oh for a muse of fire Oh from you to fire her that sound when I do that with groups of youngsters these days they all say oh it's Pirates of the Caribbean or something like that they all recognize the are you know who are who are remembering Robert Newton but still the are after the vowel what sort of R is it ah we don't know exactly I didn't know the retroflex are we are curled back like you get in the West Country but it might be the trill da oh for a muse of fiery what Alex Copeland or wait parts of Wales you know so maybe it would be an accent differences in those days as well so the R reminds you perhaps of the West Country if you're in Britain in America of course it reminds you of a completely different part of the world but it's not just West Country is it because you get other sound effects they're a kingdom for a stage not stage but stage with an air sound where'd you hear that these days well there he is - good day hi we're up in Yorkshire now aren't we yes stage stage so the hints of northern English in there I'm all about the very first word in that Shakespeare example Oh for a muse of fire o for a muse of fire not Oh for a muse of fire you know we're not down in the south are we really now Oh from use by word I get me but whales here oh yes oh yes oh and lots of other local accents around do all rather than oh so early modern English is very much an amalgam of accents in a way isn't it but perfectly intelligible to most people and indeed if you go to some of the prose texts in Shakespeare and you speak them out just like we did with Old English and with the treatise on the astrolabe with the Chaucer in fact it sounds pretty well like modern English and people who listen to it will say you know English hasn't changed that much in the last 400 years and that's the difference you see 400 years 1,600 to the present day not that much change 10 hundred to 1,400 a huge amount of change that's the big difference and that's why I called Chaucer a turning point which was in the title at the talk I see him as being very much the tipping point really looking back towards Old English in some ways but looking forward towards modern English in others another thing is anybody else quite like Chaucer that represents this and the other reason why I find choice of such a central character in the history of English language as well as in the history of English literature well it's precisely because the literature and the language of two sides of one coin what we get in Chaucer is the most remarkable array of conversational language of any Middle English writer and in needing no other writer in English until Shakespeare in Old English the only conversation we've got is the one I quoted from at the very beginning of my talk Alfred is colloquy and even that is rather stilted sort of conversation in chocen we got the most extraordinary range of conversational types of class differences and so on and accent differences as we saw with the example from the retail and so I see Chaucer as being the most illuminating and most comprehensive guide to the study of middle english pronunciation and of course grammar and vocabulary as well that it's possible to imagine and not transcended until we get to shakespeare where again we get the most extraordinary range of conversational styles different types of vocabulary and all the rest of it as you well know now I said at the beginning that we reconstruct the pronunciation as best we can we can never be 100% certain and it's important to realize that there are different interpretations of the way which you use that evidence and I've given you one this evening so to go back to the opening of The Canterbury Tales you remember I said one that out drill with his sure result the draft of March I pass it to the realtor now you notice that final sort wrote son Iran was that final ii pronounced or not it was on its way out it was in the spelling and sometimes he remained in the spelling as in the word like come modern english come c om e you know the silent e at the end that he was pronounced in old english and right through middle english and in Chaucer's time it was starting to die away century later and nobody was pronouncing that final E even if it was there in the spelling so the question is was it there in Chaucer's time did Chaucer himself say salt and rotor or did he simply say salt and wrote and Sun and earrin and melody and a did he or didn't he I know it's a choice and this is when you're doing Chaucer or Shakespeare the language reconstruction presents you in choices and it's your choice whether you decide whether you feel that the rhythm flows better with those final e's pronounced in Chaucer or whether you feel it doesn't and we could discuss for ages the pros and cons of doing it either way so there's a dramatic and dramaturgical set of choices that has to be made when you're reading aloud something in an older English reconstruction and that's part of the fun I think of the rehearsal process when you're dealing with this sort of thing but be warned when you start talking about all of this that rehearsal process can get longer and longer and longer I've never had any experience of doing it mature sir you're going to be doing that the interesting to see what happens well a huge experience of doing it with Shakespeare and gosh in a rehearsal room the actors and the director can spend ages debating whether or not a particular pronunciation is the one to go for and I'll end with just one example from that because when we did Midsummer Night's Dream in America this was actually a few years ago in original pronunciation in Opie it was a huge discussion you'll have noticed that in the Henry the fifth example I gave you I dropped the the H in front of the wall I carry there are like re not Harry H was dropped yes indeed it was you could pronounce your H s if you wanted to in Shakespeare's day and in Chaucer's day too but people were already dropping them right in Middle English too H was being dropped all over the place today of course if you drop your ages it's considered sloppy if your speak one type of accent in another type of back since it's perfectly normal no copies for example drop their reaches all the time now in Shakespeare the H was sometimes dropped and sometimes not saving Chaucer did it carry any particular effect well probably if you were well educated and you knew how to spell then you'd put your H's in because it's there in the spelling and therefore you showed by pronouncing your reaches that you're a literate educated person conversely if you didn't know how to spell if you didn't know how to read and write and in Shakespeare's time only about 4% of the population of England you have to read and write then you know there was an H there in the first place so you'd leave it out right now Midsummer Night's Dream question was do we have the characters pronounce their reaches or not so the actors and the director with me listening mainly cuz I just give them the options they thought like this well Theseus and Hippolyta and Lysander and Demetrius they're Helena and Hermia they they're educated literate people they're Nobles they know how to read and write after all and therefore we will give them their ages so it would be hippo litter and so on the mechanicals bottom and prints and all the others well they know how to read no not very well because some of them say they have difficulty in learning Peter quince messes things up a bit in the play at the end well they're mechanicals so they can drop their ages and so they do in this production question now and this is the one that kept the rehearsal room going for hours what do we do with the fairies are they upper-class fairies and pronounce their ages or are they lower-class fairies and drop their ages and there was a huge debate about this in the end they decided that the fairies were lower-class fairies they after all mess about in with crossovers and things like this and so they drop their ages and actually let's produce the rather interesting side effect because when if you know the play remember the play puck at one point is chasing the lovers through the forest and putting on their voices so that they don't fight each other well at that point puck Canole drops his ages can add them again when he's mimicking the voices of the upper-class characters and nobody expected that to happen it's one of those lovely discoveries you know that come when you when you make a decision then follow it through and realize that you discover something you never realized before and to get back to Chaucer that will happen with you if you start using some original pronunciation which also you will find quite frequently all sorts of fascinating rhymes occasional puns maybe certainly new rhythms and an overall fun aesthetic effect that you weren't expecting and that's what's going to keep the conversation going and that's going to be part of the fascination as well as the challenge of doing what you're planning to do

Channel: Bell House Films

Views: 29,229

Keywords: David Crystal, English language, pronunciation, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Beowulf, Bell House

Id: jISbgvgRTTM

Length: 42min 57sec (2577 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 01 2020