Modern Old English

There's an episode of The West Wing in which Bartlett asks a retired English teacher if she made her students "read Chaucer in the original Old English."

Sigh.

Paralleling the theme of yesterday's post, Chaucer's Middle English is practically "Early Modern English." Middle English on the page would be recognizable to many, although if they hear it pronounced it would probably be difficult to discern, and Chaucer gave us many familiar words.

Old English presents more difficulty, but our connection to it is very strong. Also known as Anglo-Saxon , it can be called Old English because it is recognizable, if you look carefully. In the opening lines of Beowulf, for instance, you can discern that:

Dena = Danes
dagum = days
cyning = king
threatum = threat
thas/that = that
him = him
gōd = good

The Lord's Prayer begins:

Fæder ūre þū þe eart on heofonum

Father our you who art in Heaven

Obviously there has been evolution, but there are many nouns that have changed little in 1000+ years:

God, mann, heaofon, eorðe, weorold, lif, lufu, word, weorc, dæg, hand, cynn
God, man, heaven, earth, world, life, love, word, work, day, hand, kin

There are also many everyday verbs that have changed little in 1000+ years:

sittan, secan, healdan, beran, giefan, cuman

sit, seek, hold/held, bear, give, come

Of the 1000 most commonly used words in day-to-day Modern English, 83% come to use from Old English. Much of the rest of our vocabulary is also from Old English. In the historical development of the English language, Old English is con sided to be used from about 500CE to about 1100, and Middle English from 1100 to about 1500. Instead of a slow evolution from Old to Middle, however, there was one linguistically catastrophic event that pushed Anglo-Saxon "over the edge" and forced it to change. That's a story for next time.

Death of a Medievalist

Tolkien in his study

Time to break one of my rules and discuss a 20th century event.

Today is the 41st anniversary of the death of J.R.R.Tolkien. Born 3 January 1892, he learned to read and write by the time he was four, even learning a little Latin from his mother. Among his literary preferences were the fairy stories of Andrew Lang and the fantasy of George MacDonald. In his teens he added the Anglo-Saxon language to his Latin studies. He and his cousins played with inventing languages of their own, a pursuit that would help him lend artistic verisimilitude to his literary masterpiece The Lord of the Rings.

A career in World War I brought him home as an invalid, after coming down with trench fever. In 1920 he became the youngest professor at the University of Leeds, on the strength of his linguistic knowledge. His first academic publication was a Middle English Vocabulary in 1922. A few years later, this was followed by an edition/translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that is still in print.

Although his focus was more on language than literature, he produced two scholarly works in the 1930s that bridged (what some would call) the gap between the two. His 1934 article "Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve's Tale" showed that Chaucer was well aware of dialects and deliberately gave some of his characters a different dialect to make their status plain to the audience

Then, in 1937, he published a lecture (given the year before) called Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. In it, he argued successfully that the poem Beowulf had value not just as a repository of Anglo-Saxon language and northern European history that could be used to cross-reference other references to history It was also a poem of literary merit. This essay continues to be fundamental to any modern study of the poem. His own translation of the poem was published a few months ago.

Current culture equates his name with a series of blockbuster adventure movies, but long after those have fallen out of favor, his academic work will still be fundamental to future scholarly endeavors.

Words from Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1342-1400) and William Shakespeare (1564-1616) are both credited with increasing English vocabulary. There is no proof that either of them actually invented the words we find in their works. All we can say for certain is that the words appeared for the first time in their works; it is likely that many of these words were in common use on the streets of London.

While Shakespeare is usually the first to come to mind when the subject of contributions to the English language comes up, Chaucer actually gets credit for having more words we know now appear in his works first. Of course, since he had a two-century head start on Shakespeare, maybe it isn't a fair contest.

Chaucer gets the credit if you can:

check the galaxy called Milky Way
bear a corrosive test
observe an oriental Persian
foster a superlative rumour
clasp a dagger
be victorious
varnish a convertible
muse on femininity
amble the equator
preen, murmur, vomit, fart, strangle, commit, retain, oppress, create a mystery, or replenish material.