Chaucer

What do you think of the Canterbury Tales? Do you have a particular favorite tale?

I never read any of this until last year, in grad school. Amazed at how difficult it was to read versus the stuff people normally complain about when it comes to old English (like Shakespeare)

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Shakespeare isn't Old English. Canterbury Tales is in a different language to modern English, many of the words that one thinks they recognise have completely different meanings.

Having said that, the type of Old english it was in is the most similar of all of them to modern english

Chaucer is Middle English, not Old English. If you want actual Old English read shit like Beowulf and The Dream of the Rood. Personally I find the satire in The Canterbury Tales really fascinating, as it goes against the popular notion of what life was like in the Middle Ages. I went into it expecting tales of the Plague and Christianity, and instead I got a pompous faggot getting tricked into kissing a woman's hairy asshole.

The Miller's tale is some funny shit

****DON'T REPLY IF YOU DIDN'T READ IN MIDDLE ENGLISH YOU PLEB FUCKS****

Maybe it's because I talk with a lot of people with thick Norfolk accents, but Middle English makes perfect sense to me.

Also far more earthy than other books like it, including the one that inspired him: The Decameron.

>Shakespeare
>old English
>grad school

Why are you lying OP?

Studying liberal arts is just adult kindergarten. They'll let a potato (with a good credit history) attend grad school for a degree in English.

Is there not a difference between old English and Old English?

I have a class on Chaucer tomorrow. Anybody fancy telling me what Estate Satire is so I don't have to look it up myself?

No there isn't, but Shakespeare is modern English, not old. That is what that user means.

lmgtfy.com/?q=Estate Satire
It would have taken less time to look it up and find it than it would have to write your message.

Not read the book but I really like Pasolini's film adaption.

>It would have taken less time to look it up
I just said I didn't want to do it myself.

Well I don't want to baby you.

>What do you think of the Canterbury Tales?
Not as good as Bocaccio's Decameron
>Do you have a particular favorite tale?
Dunno, i have yet to read it.

You're not wrong, you just shouldn't make claims you can't argue(meme) for.

As there is some confusion in this thread, English can be divided into 3 periods: Old English > Middle English > Modern English.

Old ENglish is based on the language of the West-Saxon kingdom, as it was written during Alfred's time, and it was the standard until the Norman conquest.

Middle English is commonly held to beign around 1100-50, lasting until 1450-1500.

After that it's Modern English up until today.

I'd contest that Chaucer's dialect of Middle English is still recognisable as the English we speak now, and could be called Early Modern English. Read it in the accent Sean Austin put on for Samwise Gamgee and it makes perfect sense.

I haven't read the Decameron, so correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the tales in it told by nobles fleeing the plague in Florence? If so, I would say the earthiness of the Canterbury Tales by comparison is probably on purpose, especially seeing as the disconnect between the fiction of the Nobility (as seen in the Knight's Tale) and the fiction of the Peasants (as seen in the subsequent Miller's Tale) is touched upon in the Canterbury Tales and is an important element of its Estate Satire. It's as if Chaucer is trying to de-romanticise the literature of the time

Chaucer wrote in a late 14th century dialect of Middle English that was emerging out of London, and is definitely legible to Modern English readers, far more than the dialects that poems like Gawain and the Green Knight are written in, but to call it early Modern English is overstepping it a little. This might just be my personal experience with the book, but there were still lines that were totally nonsensical and forced me to look up a translation to figure out what was going on

> It's as if Chaucer is trying to de-romanticise the literature of the time

He was. English was at the time was (and still is, really) considered brutish, or boorish. His choosing to write about common people, in his own tongue, was inherently a political act. Also worth baring in mind his how affectionately the labouring class are treated in the Tales compared to the snobbishness of people often declared proletarian heroes, like Dickens often showing them as comedy sidekicks.

Yeah it's really not that hard.

But having a "translation" side-by-side can reassure you.
That'd help, but lots of stuff was just pronounced completely differently.

For example, the ending Es were pronounced. "Care" would be car-eh. So too were other """silent""" letters: knight is k-nig-t.

>lines that were totally nonsensical
None to me, but I speak french

>reading canterbury tales
>listening to my personal playlist of 'nice' lotr music
>youtube.com/watch?v=_pGaz_qN0cw

That was some high-level comfy.

Americans and other inferior nations begone

Us Britbongs can pretty much pick up the middle english spelling intuitively for the most part. This is our text

the French might help a bit with the Middle English. I don't really know many of the ins and outs of English at that time, but I'm sure the influence from the Normans and Old French was still somewhat prevalent in English

Middle English had more loan words than Old English, which was a pretty pure Germanic language (except for Latin religious terms). Middle ENglish draws heavily on French and Latin, and also on the languages of the Scandinavian settlers who had populated large areas of England in the later Anglo-Saxon period.

While it's impossible to set a clear mark for when one period of a language ends and another begins, historians of language commonly hold MidEng to extend to 1450-1500, but this dating owes a good deal to non-linguistic consideration (waning of the middle ages, coming of the Tudors). While its not easy to justify this from a strict linguistic point, two factors can be singled out:

The vowel shift; a complex set of changes in pronunciation of long vowels. The /a:/ like in 'father' would be found in words like 'save' and 'caas'("case"), /e:/ in 'nede' and 'sweete', /u./ in 'hous', etc. Basically before you fucked up your orthography :^)

Secondly there wa the rise of "Modern Standard Englih", the "Chancery Standard" employed by beaurocrats in Westminster and elsewhere, and then the advent of printing around 1473.

(not that anyone cares, but I'm studying this shit rn so typing it down for you lads works as notes)

Shakespeare isn't Old English, but it is old English, as OP pointed out
Chaucer isn't a foreign language either, you'd have to go some 400, but at least 300 years for that

Also the press destroyed my favourite character in English: the thorn.

RIP eð and þorn, I will miss you forever.

As a Norwegian I feel you, friend. We even lost the sound in spoken Norwegian while we had it in Norse. Feels really bad, man.

(side trivia: many Norwegian people struggle making the th-sound, so when singing "Happy birthday" (in English), they pronounce it "birssday")

I hate what happened to our language. Saxon sounds so good when spoken, and looks so good when written. If I ever become a famous author (haha!) I'm bringing them back.

Welsh still distinguishes eð and þorn in the shape of the digraphs dd and th.

Which I guess is a bit strange because it's a Britonnic, not Germanic, language.

>tfw too dumb to read it in Middle English

Takes me like an hour for a single tale

Without memeing, I'm legitimately impressed that people have the concentration and commitment to read Chaucer in Middle English outside of an academic context. I just read the Canterbury Tales in the OUP modern translation because I fancied some medieval stories. Unfortunately I don't have the patience to study them for the poetry!

You get into it really quickly. Once you get into the flow (speaking aloud really helps) it is great and actually gets really enjoyable just because it sounds so great.

Me again, while I haven't yet read Chaucer's actual works, it's impressive to see how many times he's cited in my books on Middle English to illustrate various things. How the stress in French loan words (end of the word) contrast with native Germanic words (where the stress is on the first syllable): 'In divers art and in diverse figures'. And various old English accents, like the students from 'fer in the north' in the Reeve's Tale. How the northern form of -(e)s ending for third pers.pres.ind. verbs ('he fyndes & bringes' vs. 'he fyndeth') which would later become the standard form.

>and instead I got a pompous faggot getting tricked into kissing a woman's hairy asshole.
sauce?

The Miller's Tale my dude.

Not quite nobles, but very rich young adults. Boccaccio's intent is really odd, because he wrote the Decameron with literate women as his only audience in mind, but it seems as though there's something for everyone in each of the stories. Still, that's the big reason most of the stories are more Romantic than, say, Chaucer's. That said, there's enough dirty jokes to maybe change your perception of the Middle Ages a little. One of the ten Decameron storytellers exclusively tells smutty stories.

more liek canturbury fails. amirite?

I like a few tales, but I honestly regard it highly because of its elevation of the English language. It's not the best in the world, and I agree with the guy who said he liked Boccaccio better.

I'd say it's also Chaucer's elevation of England as a whole. That it opens talking about birds and spring plantlife is very, well, English. You see echoes of that all over the place, from Bede's analogy of a bird in a snowstorm, resurfacing in poems by Blake and Wordsworth, and even Orwell talks passionately about toads.

Decameron and Arabian Nights could almost take place anywhere, but I think the significance of Chaucer is that it's entirely English, and specifically so.

I hope what I said makes sense.

desu it's just a bad copy of the decameron

Only read a small,translated selection I got for less than a dollar,but judging by that,it's pretty good.
I should read the original now that I have a copy but there are other things I'm interested in.

>missing the fun this much
Sad!

>he wrote the Decameron with literate women as his only audience in mind,
This seems like a crazy thing to suggest.

Like any author (a talented one especially, writing an epic, epicly artistic, work of literture, related to tradition? And an extreme exemplar highness?), I can understand authors wrote with people in mind...but to think that men could not enjoy, appreciate, gain, from his writing? What is the evidence and what was his reasoning?

I understand if women made up 98% of the market, or even 100%. But for him to know that men have enjoyed and gained from reading, and possibly do, and possibly will, to not just write for even Alien in mind? For even god in mind?

youtube.com/watch?v=UDGsh-Hrxho
>and the canterbury tales will shoot up to the top of the best seller list
>and stay there for twenty seven weeks
What did he mean by this?

Certainly enough stories about random men and women just fucking.

There's one which reads like an user's greentext erotica. A dude winds up naked in the cold, so he goes up to a random house and whoops! looks like it's run by a stunning qt who just happens to be alone and of course they fuck. And this is all supported by Boccaccio.
I don't really like Bocaccio desu. I don't really get him, I think, because I know enough about literature to know that if I don't like someone, it's probably not that *they're* shit.