phonemes & Chaucer

Modern English Sound Inventory

Middle English Sound Inventory

Consonants with 1:1 relation

Consonant letters that represent different sounds

short vowels

long vowels

diphthongs

Chaucer’s life

• *around 1343 – London or East Anglia?

• Family: rich wine merchants

• Substantial evidence, ca. 500 documents

• 1357 footboy with a noble lady

• 1359 participation in Hundred Year‘s War

(1337-1453)

• Journeys to Flanders, Italy, France?

• 1366 wedding with Philippa de Roet, maid of

the queen

• Position as valet, journeys to Italy

• Start of literary productivity (1368?): Book of

the Duchess

• 1380s: tax collector in Kent, begins working on

Canterbury Tales

• ~1380-1387 Troilus and Criseyde

• 1386: Member of parliament for Kent

• † 25. October 1400 in London

Chaucer’s work

• Language of his writings: English!

instead of Latin, French, Anglo-Norman

• repercussions: 83 manuscripts of CTs, 16 of T+C

(cf. Nibelungenlied only 35 manuscripts; 11 complete)

• Stays popular until the introduction of printing

(Caxton: 1478 and 1483!)

Old English Poetry

• Stave rhyme (=alliteration)

• Long and short syllables as metre

Chaucer’s Poetry

• New, alternating metre: stressed/unstressed syllables

• French “import“

• Problem: French final syllable stressed – stress in Germanic languages

on root syllable

• Further development towards iambic pentameter (=blank verse

Variation within the verse

Form of the verse very important

Verses made to fit the needs

Word final schwa not always pronounced

• Apocope before words starting on vowels

for tyme it is to ryse and hennes go

Manipulating the number of syllables by using fillers

• that in whan that

• Infinitive with to, for to, or without any particle

• Prefix: gan or bigan