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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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AnotherDPC:
Verse and rhyme are very important in reconstructing Middle English pronunciation, which includes voicing the final -Es.
So does anyone know why there are TWICE as many final -Es at the ENDS of Chaucer's lines as there should be?
rosebudIII:
well done, everyone, we've all just proven that youtube is NOT the place for scholarly discourse. yay...
@resurgam44 props for realizing that you can't argue with someone severely misinformed and committed to ignorance.
@AnotherDPC: *sigh* *headshake* *headdesk*
@everyone else, random thought: isn't it funny to imagine how DUMB chaucer would have been if there was indeed no vowel shift, because then his stuff wouldn't rhyme? hahahaha.....
AnotherDPC:
OK, so please help us out: SHOW us the Great Vowel Shift. Give us or point to a list of words that were spelled one way and then spelled another.
Any news on why there are TWICE as many final Es at the ends of Chaucers lines as there should be?
I really am keen to dispell my ignorance, but I haven't had any help so far.
And with that, everyone immediately... did nothing at all.
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Grant
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| So does anyone know why there are TWICE as many final -Es at the ENDS of Chaucer's lines as there should be? |
Because the final e was hardly pronounced at all - it was a schwa.
Some regional accents almost add a schwa to the end of verbs today.
So why are they over-represented at the ends of lines? It's because most ends in English poesy are masculine, and in Chaucer's time many of these masculine endings would add the schwa.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| DPCrisp wrote: | resurgam44:
Your method is completely unacademic, and frankly has no basis in reality. Even if you don't accept the linguistic reconstructions of Middle English phonemes, surely you can accept that when Shakespeare made Falstaff say:
"If reasons were as plentiful as blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion." He was pronouncing things differently; with an unshifted, modern accent, the pun is completely lost (hint: raisins). |
I just realized that if this line is pronounced with a cockney accent (I believe it is a cockney accent) the pun is preserved. There is nothing archaic about it.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Grant wrote: | Because the final e was hardly pronounced at all - it was a schwa.
Some regional accents almost add a schwa to the end of verbs today.
So why are they over-represented at the ends of lines? It's because most ends in English poesy are masculine, and in Chaucer's time many of these masculine endings would add the schwa. |
Can you say this again in English?
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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Grant, did you miss these bits a few pages back?
Me:
To clarify:
The Canterbury Tales General Prologue has 32000+ letters in 860 lines; 3800+ are the letter E. If E occurred randomly, we'd expect about 100 lines to end with E.
But it's not random: E occurs more frequently at the end of a word -- 12% of all letters are E, whereas 28% of final letters are E. With about 1900 out of 6700 words ending in E, we'd expect about 240 lines to end with E.
As it is, over 460 lines, over 50% of them, end in E. That is a distinct bias towards the very last letter of the line. There are twice as many final Es at the ends of lines as there should be.
- Whether silent or voiced, how do scholars explain this?
- If so much of the reconstruction of Middle English depends on rhyme and verse structure, isn't this bound to cause a systematic error in analysis of the text?
Ian Lancashire, University of Toronto:
You have a very perceptive point that I'm not going to be able to help much in my answer. This I hazard: most initial and medial instances of "e" are already in separate syllables and must be sounded anyway. Final "e" can normally remain unsounded. To sound it adds a syllable. Me:
I take it then that the preponderance of final Es at the ends of lines is not something recognised and explained by current scholarship. (Where do I apply for my Nobel Prize? ;-)
Do you mean to say even in Middle English "Final "e" can normally remain unsounded"? Isn't that stridently denied by everyone else? Are you suggesting that final E's might be added for the sake of the meter? Him:
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Because the final e was hardly pronounced at all - it was a schwa. |
The issue is that, read as familiar English, the majority of final Es are not pronounced at all. Perhaps we should qualify that as "no more than any accent, affectation or poetic reading of modern English would".
We have silent Es now. How can we tell that Chaucer voiced them? From the fact that they're written there?
As above, meter and rhyme are all-important here, but a) we have to assume what the meter and rhyme were supposed to be -- they can not be deduced -- and b) the pitch is proven to be queer.
| Some regional accents almost add a schwa to the end of verbs today. |
Quite. And even more so when over-enunciating, such as when elucidating spelling... or when inventing spellings.
For this reason, I pretty well ignore the -A in Anglo-Saxon/Old English. Ditto the -R in Norse.
| So why are they over-represented at the ends of lines? It's because most ends in English poesy are masculine, and in Chaucer's time many of these masculine endings would add the schwa. |
Eh? What kind of English has masculine anything? Are the other 50% of line-endings feminine?
What evidence is there that they are masculine, feminine or anything else? Their preponderance?
As above, what I mean by "twice as many as there should be" is that even allowing for E being more common at the end than the middle of the word, it's not random in Chaucer. The -Es are engineered to occur disproportionately at the ends of lines.
- Is it because Chaucer had an extraordinary command of the language and arranged to have masculine noun/verb/etc endings at the ends of his lines? If so, why? Aesthetically pleasing?
- Or was it because he or the scribe simply chose to end an awful lot of lines with E, perhaps for aesthetic reasons?
Er, actually we can tell: spelling was not standardised in this period, a fortiori there was no standard gender marking system, even if there was a way for them to know which gender words had. There wasn't a system for Chaucer to have extraordinary command of.
So what explanations for the -Es are left?
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Grant
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| Eh? What kind of English has masculine anything? Are the other 50% of line-endings feminine? |
A masculine ending is stressed; a feminine unstressed. So in
"To be or not to be
That is the question"
the first line has a masculine ending and the second feminine. Some have criticised Shakespeare's most famous line because of the weak feminine ending of "question." It does rather die off, doesn't it?
Iambic verse consists of unstressed/stressed units called feet giving the classic ti-tum, ti-tum, ti-tum. Most of Chaucer is iambic.
If the final e was hardly voiced at all it might serve as a way of applying stress to the end of lines when required, which would be most of time.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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I've never heard the like, Grant.
So are all those endings masculine because the -Es are to be voiced; or are they feminine because they are silent?
In the other nearly-half of the poem, how do we know whether they're masculine or feminine? By reading it in a normal English way; or by reading it in a reconstructed, Middle English way?
But these are the details on which the reconstruction is based.
If it's "read it as normal and voice or don't voice according to what you feel the poem demands", then you're on our side. I have no problem with poetic licence. Fine art aficionados can slug it out as much as they like.
The problem is that the linguists treat it as though there is no poetic licence and details can be deduced about the language with subtle precision.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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I'm not into poetry myself, unless framed as lyrics.
First they told us it has to have a certain meter and things must rhyme.
Then 'more sophisticated' poetry turns out to be a bit variable and should be read naturalistically. (A comma is not a breath and there is not necessarily a comma at the end of every line.)
It's like the linguists are stuck in kindergarten poetry and can't entertain any slackness or variation in rhyme and meter. But they end up using poetic/linguistic licence to force Chaucer (et al) to conform to the presumed poetic structure.
Saw Mark Steele on telly explaining iambic pentameter:
"shall I comPARE thee TO a SUMmer's DAY?" Sounded ludicrous. (No one does poor old Shakepeare justice either.)
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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Lines like
"Tender crops and the young Sun", duly intoned with the correct meter, throw it off for me. He doesn't mention "tender crops and the young Sun" at all; he says that when April has done his bit and when
"Zephirus eke with his sweet breath inspired has in every holt and heath tender crops" and
"the young Sun has in the Ram his half course a-run", then longen folk to goin' on pilgrimages. If I had to read it as a poem -- let alone if I had to memorise it as an almost-foreign poem -- I'd never get it.
Cf. "She came home in floods of tears and a sedan chair."
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Grant
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I think the final e is phonetic but it's not supposed to be a separate syllable.
Imagine a comic-book northerner saying the word book. The kuh sound at the end is slightly more stressed than when a southerner says the same thing (obviously it depends precisely what accents we are talking about). When Chaucer wrote booke (actually I'm not sure if he did) he didn't want his readers to pronounce it in two syllables. One syllable was fine but the last e showed that the final k was accompanied with a little of breath of extra air. That's still the case today except our spelling convention ignores the breath at the end.
I've re-read some of Chaucer recently and Mick's insight that it's just modern English is clearly true.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| I've re-read some of Chaucer recently and Mick's insight that it's just modern English is clearly true. |
Jolly good.
Then why did you say this?:
| I think the final e is phonetic but it's not supposed to be a separate syllable. |
We use silent Es all over the place and think nothing of it. In English and French, they often affect the 1, 2, even 3, letters before. So how can the presence of final -Es in Chaucer tell us how they are to be pronounced? Nothing about sonne, yronne, tendre, croppes... and so on and on and on... says for sure they are anything but sun, a-run, tender, crops, etc. To say "English used to include the words 'sonnuh', 'i-ronnuh', 'tendray' and 'croppezz'" is unfounded* speculation.
* I won't say "unevidenced" because the funny spellings can be construed as possibly indicating funny pronunciations; but this is the same as the evidence that English is pronounced "enn-gleesh", or ghoti is pronounced "fish" or that ghoti is pronounced "goatee".
It is certainly a matter of which pronunciations are consistent with which spellings; but it is furthermore a matter of which can be deduced from the spellings to be the, correct pronunciations.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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Anna is "annuh" and Ann is "an", but which one is Anne? "Which one is implied by the spelling?", I mean, not "which one have you been taught to say as a reflex?"
Is "die-an" a mispronunciation of Diana based on spelling it D-i-a-n-e?
Do the Germans say "amuh-lee" for Amelie? They usually say "uh" for -E, so shouldn't they say "Amelia"?
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Grant wrote: | | Imagine a comic-book northerner saying the word book. The kuh sound at the end is slightly more stressed than when a southerner says the same thing (obviously it depends precisely what accents we are talking about). When Chaucer wrote booke (actually I'm not sure if he did) he didn't want his readers to pronounce it in two syllables. One syllable was fine but the last e showed that the final k was accompanied with a little of breath of extra air. |
That is the case I argued originally in this Flying Chaucers discussion, until Dan converted me.
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| Mick Harper wrote: | Here are four brief passages taken at regular intervals from earliest Anglo-Saxon to latest Modern English. So that you can judge properly, I have used modern spelling and the Latin alphabet, though the words themselves are as written at the time (though of course they have been selected by me). All you have to do is decide whether they show rapid and radical change as academic linguistics claims or not, as I claim:
The first is from The Wasteland by T S Elliot and is from the twentieth century
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
Next, Chaucer, The Prologue, fourteenth century (with my corrected spelling in brackets).
A swerd and bokeler bar he by his syde. (A sword and buckler bore he by his side)
A whit cote and a blew hood wered he. (A white coat and a blue hood weared he)
A bagpipe wel koude he blow and sowne, (A bagpipe well could he blow and sound)
And therwithal he brought us out of towne. (And there with all he brought us out of town)
Next the Death of Edward from the eleventh century:
Englum and Sexum, oretm�gcum,
swa ymbclyppa� cealde brymmas,
��t eall Eadwarde, ��elum kinge,
hyrdon holdlice hagestealde menn.
And finally some Caedmon from the seventh century:
Nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes uard,
metud�s maecti end his modgidanc,
uerc uuldurfadur, sue he uundra gihuaes,
eci dryctin, or astelid�.
OK, now you probably noticed that the first two were practically identical. But there no linguist will agree with you. To them Chaucer is Middle English, i.e. halfway between Anglo-Saxon and Modern English. I dunno how they manage to convince themselves of this but I have had a zillion arguments with them and they keep insisting over and over again that Chaucer is just a way-station between full-blown Anglo-Saxon and Modern English. I'll leave that one with you.
Now probably you can't tell whether the two Anglo-Saxon passages are or are not very different. I can't myself, it's all gibberish in a foreign language to me. However an Anglo-Saxon academic did accuse me of deliberately choosing a late Anglo-Saxon poet who wrote in an antique style, in order to make my case. So I guess the language really hadn't changed very much in four centuries.
It's pretty obvious to anybody with an IQ in three figures that these are two separate languages, neither of which has changed very much, but that have been spatchcocked together in order to provide a spurious account of the origins of English. That's basically what academic linguists are for, concocting modern-day creation myths. |
Having recently revisited this thread from the beginning, I can now understand how Mr Harper and I could have ended up, some little while ago, having a silly and rather fruitless argument.
There is, I think, a fundamental problem here of what is best described as an over hyperbolic argument. It is obvious that samples 3 and 4 are qualitatively different from samples 1 and 2. If 2 were presented as an older form of 1 there can be no further argument. It is only when it is maintained that there is in effect no difference at all between 1 and 2 that we get into trouble. Firstly it is a claim that is obviously incorrect and secondly it is a claim that is wholly unnecessary.
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