English 201
C. Knight
SOME TIPS FOR READING CHAUCER'S LANGUAGE
1. The "meter" (or formal measurement of rhythm) of Chaucer's usual poetic line is "iambic pentameter" (deeDUM, deeDUM, deeDUM, deeDUM, deeDUM):2. Hence--to make the line come out right--the vowel "e" is often pronounced where it is now
silent:
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne.
3. All long vowels, because of the "great vowel shift," sound like French, German, Spanish, or Italian rather than like modern English. Hence the pronoun "I" is pronounced "ee"; "me" is pronounced "may"; "that" is pronounced "thaht."
4. The spelling "ow" in words like "fowles," "now," and "yow" is pronounced like the "ou" in "you."
5. All consonants are pronounced: "l" in folk, "g" in "yonge," "k" in "knight."
6. Not only do we pronounce the "k" in "knight," we pronounce the "gh." The spelling "gh" sounds rather like the German "ch."
7. The spelling of vowel sounds is often odd. For example, "I" is usually written as "y" when the vowel is long. Sometimes you can guess a meaning by thinking of the word with a slightly different spelling: "esed" is "eased." In Chaucer it is often easier to get the meaning if you know how the sound works than if you know how the spelling works.
8. Try to read Chaucer aloud as much as possible. You will probably feel silly when you first try it, but after a while you will feel more comfortable and start noticing things you would not have seen in reading silently. Chaucer was written to be read aloud. Try to read the original rather than the modern English translation. Use the translation only when you really need to know what something means. The poetry (as Robert Frost once said) is what gets lost in the translation.