This historical process leaves us with a language that is structurally very much like our own. For a modern reader, these take getting used to, but the patterns are relatively few, and and they become familiar with practice. Other syntactic variations in Troilus and Criseyde include VS constructions ( to the clepe I alday failleth thyng), Aux-S-V constructions ( can he pulle), and, in dependent clauses, SOV constructions ( that love hem bring til he a lasshe have). Middle English is capable of the periodic sentence (like the first sentence of Troilus and Criseyde, or of Milton's Paradise Lost, or of the American Declaration of Independence), and Chaucer is one of its few masters. Because it can no longer distinguish between subject and object cases in nouns, English relies increasingly on sentence order to establish meaning, and as sentence order becomes more fixed, the inflectional system decays further. English tends increasingly toward phrasal grammar, for example in its future tense ( they will go Old English had no future tense at all it expressed futurity by context).
It no longer has separate noun declensions, and its strong (irregular) verb conjugations are diminished newly minted verbs get the weak (regular) conjugation, forming the past tense by adding -(e)d. The adjectives are there in the natural language, but medieval poetry is interested in the kind of nuance conveyed by the relational elements in a sentence.īy Chaucer's day too, the inflectional system of English has decayed considerably, both under its own momentum and in the presence of Norman French. This is fortunate for two reasons: it is the function words, the grammatical connective tissues, that convey sentence meaning and these words are particularly important to Chaucer's literary style, which is adjective-poor compared to later styles like Shakespeare's. But Chaucer's function words (pronouns, demonstratives, prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs) are from Old English we still have the same set of function words today, and these are among the most recognizable of his words to us. Chaucer's poetic vocabulary contains about 8,000 words, of which about 4,000 are French. By Chaucer's day, English has been flooded with French. In terms of sentence syntax, Old English already tends toward the SVO (subject-verb-object) structure that is nearly universal in current English, but the inflectional system of Old English-in particular, its ability to distinguish noun cases-permits variations in sentence order like those possible in literary Latin these appear especially in works written during the Old English period by monks and other Latin-trained scholars. Present Day English can distinguish between the subject and object cases of most pronouns ( who-whom he-him) Old English could do so with nouns as well. It still has some inflectional elements ( ring-rang love-loved who-whom), but not as many. Present Day English grammar is phrasal by contrast: it makes more of its grammar by forming phrases ( to eat = etan). It is also highly inflectional: it tends to make grammar by adding particles to words ( etan = to eat). It contains relatively few of the French- and Latin-derived words common in English today. Old English, the language of Beowulf, and of England before the eleventh century Norman conquest, is a Germanic language. Still another way is to get a historical sense of the structure of Chaucer's language. The approach is described in the section on editing method. Another way is for the editor to normalize some spellings this edition selectively normalizes to values found elsewhere in the Corpus Christi manuscript or, less often, in other principal manuscripts of the poem. The best way is for the language learner to read enough Middle English to become familiar with it.
There are historical reasons for this, and there are ways to reduce the language gap. Some sentences make instant sense others may unravel partway through. Many of the words are the same as in Present Day English others are recognizable but strangely spelled still others are completely unintelligible. To someone reading Chaucer for the first time, his language looks both familiar and foreign.
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