i before e is rubbish, because there just as many words that are the other way around. I think someone just liked rhyming.
"I before E
Except after C
When it says 'Ee'"
Generally holds.
I learned it as:
I before E,
Except after C,
Or when it says A
As in “neighbor” or “weigh.”
That's the version I learned as well. The problem with "when it says ee" is that many words that don't say "ee" in Blighty do say "ee" in North America, such as "leisure".
Considerable variation in North American English for "leisure" - I was taught (small town northern Canada) that it had a short e.
Re Dutch. Spent a couple weeks in Amsterdam. I've got some receptive German (understand what's said). After about 3 days I was understanding Dutch when people spoke it.
Some years ago, the comedian Eddie Izzard learned how to speak the English of Chaucer (I think he is a gifted linguist - he certainly speaks french fluently). He then went to Holland and spoke to a farmer about purchasing a cow. He found that there was enough similarity for both him and the farmer to make themselves understood.
Frisian. My Rhineland cousins live close to Netherlands. It's quite interesting to see the closeness to English; it is said to be closest dialect and I think it is true. (my transliteration: "unser fater, let yo nām hilige vurd, lit yo wil been vurd, an here'd like good as in himel" - start of Lord's prayer, pronounce everything, e.g., hilige = hīll-i-guh -- holy)
That's it! Thank you - I had slightly misremembered it.
The place name guy told us that before the war, students of Old English could travel across the continent - the Germanic bits from the Netherlands to Austria, and make themselves understood - not in his own experience, he was too young.
I imagine they were keeping to simple ideas and words such as bread and bed. A random word from my dictionary (can't do the crossed d for voiced th) "innothtydernes" might well have been useful, but I have my doubts about its being well known. (Weakness of the bowels.)
My parents used to live along the road from a Kentish settlement called Freezingham, a placename speaking of the first settlers being Frisians.
He then went to Holland and spoke to a farmer about purchasing a cow. He found that there was enough similarity for both him and the farmer to make themselves understood.
(Although I have yet to meet a Dutch person who doesn't speak at least good English, so for a fair comparison, Mr. Izzard should have brought a friend who hadn't been studying Chaucer, to try and buy a cow from the neighbouring farmer.)
It sounds like Middle English - which I found harder than either Beowulf or Chaucer. It's just on the edge of what you think ought to be comprehensible.
I think it’s another name for the game that here is called “Telephone”—one person whispers something into the ear of person next to them, who in turn does the same, and so on down the line. At the end, everyone laughs at how what was first said changed as it was passed along.
Not just the name of a game. It is a term used to describe how a story/message etc changes as it's passed from one to another. Obviously based on the game.
Some years ago, the comedian Eddie Izzard learned how to speak the English of Chaucer (I think he is a gifted linguist - he certainly speaks french fluently). He then went to Holland and spoke to a farmer about purchasing a cow. He found that there was enough similarity for both him and the farmer to make themselves understood.
I've had a similar experience trying to get by not with Chaucer's English but with ordinary English and a Flemish speaker in Ostend. He didn't speak English but as it's a Channel port had probably heard other people speaking it.
Nobody really knows what languages the peasants spoke in Roman Britain. It wasn't something the Romans bothered much about. Everyone has always assumed they all spoke some sort of ancestor of Welsh. There is at least one academic - but I can't remember who they are - who has argued in the last few years that at least some of the natives in south eastern Roman Britain might have already been speaking a language that was more like Anglo-Saxon than Welsh. Apparently, for all the similarities between English and Flemish/Dutch/Frisian, there are some differences that suggest English has been evolving separately since further back than c400-500 AD.
It sounds like Middle English - which I found harder than either Beowulf or Chaucer.
I’m confused. Chaucer is Middle English.
Nah, he's early modern. Middle is Pearl and Gawain and Ancrene Wisse.
The AB texts (such as those you list here) are a heavily-inflected, Anglo-Saxon influenced version of middle English. Chaucer, although a contemporary of the Gawain poet, wrote Canterbury Tales in a much less inflected, London dialect of Middle English.
And this London dialect basically became Chancery English, which basically became Early Modern, so there's some truth in calling Chaucer "early modern", but I think you go a little far. I'd be inclined to put the dividing line between Chaucer and Malory.
The general point (that Chaucer can be read in the original language by schoolchildren with a little glossing, but not much else in the way of assistance, whereas the AB texts are almost as opaque as Beowulf) is reasonable.
No, when I took a course in Middle English in college we used The Canterbury Tales as our text.
Yes, I was always taught that Chaucer is Middle English, and that early Modern English dates from the mid- to late-15th Century. That what the OED says:
“The chronological boundaries of the Middle English period are not easy to define, and scholarly opinions vary. The dates that OED3 has settled on are 1150-1500. (Before 1150 being the Old English period, and after 1500 being the early modern English period.) In terms of ‘external’ history, Middle English is framed at its beginning by the after-effects of the Norman Conquest of 1066, and at its end by the arrival in Britain of printing (in 1476) and by the important social and cultural impacts of the English Reformation (from the 1530s onwards) and of the ideas of the continental Renaissance.”
It sounds like Middle English - which I found harder than either Beowulf or Chaucer.
I’m confused. Chaucer is Middle English.
Nah, he's early modern. Middle is Pearl and Gawain and Ancrene Wisse.
Out of interest, when you studied your degree in English, was there a separate module for Early Modern? We had a compulsory Middle English module, and an optional Old English module, but no Early Modern, and I don't think I heard that term. The next one up, in time frame (as we looked chronologically at the stages of literature) was Renaissance (Elizabethan and Jacobean) - Marlowe, Jonson, etc. Shakespeare had a whole module to himself. I see from Wikipedia these are considered as Early Modern, but I don't remember this term being used.
We studied Chaucer in Middle English, along with Pearl and Gawain. We knew they were earlier than Chaucer, and we looked at the language differences, but they all came under the same module of Middle English. Even when we looked at the Scottish guys, Henryson and Dunbar, and specifically at how their language differed from English poets, it was all within the module of Middle English. (This was in the early 1990s, at University of London, in case teaching methods/categories have changed over time). I see Wikipedia refers to early Middle English and late Middle English, and that sounds familiar in terms of how we were taught, looking at the earlier and later poets within the Middle English category.
It's amazing how hard it is to find a translation online.
Regarding Chaucer: My program placed him firmly in Middle English as well, with Shakespeare as the exemplar for Early Modern. Beowulf was, of course, Old...
It's amazing how hard it is to find a translation online.
Regarding Chaucer: My program placed him firmly in Middle English as well, with Shakespeare as the exemplar for Early Modern. Beowulf was, of course, Old...
Ah, thank you - I hadn't found a translation, just the original, which seemed a bit daunting!
We studied Chaucer in Middle English, along with Pearl and Gawain. We knew they were earlier than Chaucer,
Ah, but they're not. The Gawain poet and Chaucer were contemporaries. The language is logically older, sure, with more Old English structures and so on, but what you're really seeing are regional differences in the development of English.
I've been reading multiple biographies of Tolkien and Ancrene Wisse comes up repeatedly.
Our Middle English lecturer mentioned Tolkien quite a bit, and how various Middle English texts had influenced his novels. I'm thinking now that she may well have mentioned Ancrene Wisse, but it wasn't one of the texts we studied, so I guess if she mentioned it, I didn't take it in.
I've been reading multiple biographies of Tolkien and Ancrene Wisse comes up repeatedly.
Our Middle English lecturer mentioned Tolkien quite a bit, and how various Middle English texts had influenced his novels. I'm thinking now that she may well have mentioned Ancrene Wisse, but it wasn't one of the texts we studied, so I guess if she mentioned it, I didn't take it in.
It could certainly be argued that you can find the best of Tolkien's scholarship in his essay on Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad. Here's a link for anyone that's interested.
We studied Chaucer in Middle English, along with Pearl and Gawain. We knew they were earlier than Chaucer,
Ah, but they're not. The Gawain poet and Chaucer were contemporaries. The language is logically older, sure, with more Old English structures and so on, but what you're really seeing are regional differences in the development of English.
I think this is the crux of the issue here - whether we're talking about a stage of language development, or a period in history. I don't remember this distinction being made when I was studying Middle English. It is hazy in my memory now, as this was nearly 30 years ago, and I haven't read or studied Middle English stuff since. I know the main structure of the degree was chronological- modules covered literature within certain periods in history, to show how literature (not language) developed over time. I know in the Middle English module, some works were described as earlier and some as later. I don't remember all the authors we looked at - only the ones I wrote essays/exams on. I actually don't remember finding Pearl or Gawain more difficult than Chaucer - I enjoyed them far more, and the texts I used were annotated, so I remember them being relatively straightforward to read, and I also read a translation by Tolkien of Gawain, as well as the original, and also went to see an opera of it, which was great fun! We also had a very lively lecturer, who brought these texts to life. She talked about the differences in the language from Chaucer. But each author we looked at had differences in their language. But all were within the Middle English module.
No, when I took a course in Middle English in college we used The Canterbury Tales as our text.
Somewhere or other, I have a little book called the Cantbeworried Tales, set in the Sydney of the late 60s/early 70s and written in mock-Chaucerian by an English humorist resident here. I can remember a couplet from a description of the petty criminal court :
Importuning ladies, fresh from beds
Who paid their fines as business overheads
Sir Simon Armitage has translated Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It was also staged (at the Sam Wanamaker playhouse at the Globe, which is how I know) with knights falling in and out of the audience saucily.
These mutual intelligibility stories need a pinch of salt. A lot depends on the complexity of the conversation, the natural language ability (accuracy of hearing sounds and identifying phonemes, ability to guess unknown words from context), how fast the speakers are speaking, and so on.
@fineline At the time the English Department (Queen's, Belfast) had a Professor of English and a Professor of Old English. The OE curriculum spanned Beowulf to Chaucer and was dominant in the Honours school.
We don't know exactly when any of the Pearl poems were written, but roughly contemporary with Chaucer is a best estimate from the evidence. They aren't an earlier form of the language either, but rather a different dialect: a path not taken by London English.
Gawain is mostly written in alliterative verse which is an older tradition of verse writing compared to the rhyming verse of early Chaucer, which he got from French literature, or later Chaucer, which I believe he got from Italian literature. That said, the alliterative verse of Gawain, and Lsngland is written by writers with no cultural memory of what makes a good alliterative line: the way they use it it is a poor medium for a long poem.
@fineline At the time the English Department (Queen's, Belfast) had a Professor of English and a Professor of Old English. The OE curriculum spanned Beowulf to Chaucer and was dominant in the Honours school.
Al, that makes sense. I guess if it's a dominant part of the curriculum, then of course finer distinctions will be made. Middle English was a constant part of our curriculum, with a couple of excellent lecturers (who also taught Old English), but not the main focus, and it seemed quite separate from the other modules - different sort of exam too, at a different time, where we had to translate passages as well as analyse them. We had a lot more lecturers focused on 18th century literature. We had a system where if we wanted to study modern literature, we had to do modules on all the periods beforehand (except Old English, as that was optional, but we still had introductory lectures on it). I really wanted to do the modern modules and the American literature module, so I was sometimes seeing earlier periods more as a means to an end!
Middle English wasn't my favourite, but the main lecturer was great - she was lively and full of energy and totally different from the other lecturers, who were mostly Oxbridge graduates and very traditional, largely male, and some of them quite stuffy without good people skills. She had been a school teacher, done her PhD a bit later in life than the norm, though really knew her stuff. But she was very focused on making Middle English interesting and accessible, so maybe didn't focus so much on the fine distinctions of categories.
Though Chaucer was referred to as Middle English when we did him for A level too, and in the university libraries, he was under the Middle English section, so I guess it was a more systemic thing too.
Interesting point about Anglo-Saxon influences in the South-East predating the Roman departure, because it ties in with something I recall from a discussion of local archaeology. The Darent Valley was divided into a sequence of estates which may originate before the Romans, and which persist in modern parish boundaries. Each estate had a villa at the centre, succeeded by a later establishment away from the villa site. And one of them, at Farningham, did not have a normal villa style building, but something much more Germanic, while dating from before the English Settlement. It was a long time ago I came across this, and probably evening class again.
One point about the area was that it looked very much as if the new, English, occupants moved in respecting the existing boundaries. This may not be general across the country.
In the Purgatory Trump legacy thread, there are comments about a court case brought against the former president regarding illegal emoluments. Apparently the Supreme Court has ruled that as he is no longer president, the case is 'moot' and cannot proceed to trial. In British legalese, if a point is 'moot' it is debatable. If it is debatable, it should be tried. Does 'moot' have a different meaning in the USA?
I have just annoyed youngest daughter by proving that a strong preterite and past participle of snow (snew/snown) exist. Don't know if either is used outside the UK.
Later a moot point, initially a legal issue, became used more widely to mean one that was open to argument, debatable or uncertain. The author Gerald Durrell used it in this sense when he wrote: “Whether he could have bitten us successfully ... was rather a moot point, but it was not the sort of experiment I cared to make.”
Today, I think most British English speakers would use moot in this sense, or as a verb to mean proposed (“Banking: plan mooted for merger of trade associations” ran a typical headline this week). It’s a different story in the United States, where since the 19th century a moot point has been one that is at best academic and at worst irrelevant. The OED quotes the supreme court, no less, ruling that “a moot question” has “no bearing” on an issue. So in 2000, Time magazine, writing about the US election, said: “Media critics have long argued that networks should not call races until all polls have closed to avoid affecting turnout. It’s a moot argument: information will out.”
Just to complicate things, the older meaning of moot as in a hypothetical discussion by law students survives in the US, unchanged, in the moot courts at which American law students practise their skills in simulated legal proceedings.
Apart from the UK use of 'mooted' as a synonym for 'proposed' it seems to me that a common thread between the UK and US issues is that if a point is moot then it doesn't matter: Brits (if I have understood things properly) think that the point has been settled, while Americans think there's no point in trying to settle it.
Following on from the quote that @Fawkes Cat provided, in US law schools, a moot court is a mock/practice appellate argument. A simulated trial for law students is referred to as a mock trial, not as a moot court.
Practicing lawyers will also do moot courts to prepare for real upcoming arguments before an appellate court.
In common usage where I'm from, "moot" means "irrelevant". Even if debated, and even if a result emerges from the debate, that result will have no impact on anything.
I have just annoyed youngest daughter by proving that a strong preterite and past participle of snow (snew/snown) exist. Don't know if either is used outside the UK.
I have never known either of them to be used IN the UK! But then, I have only lived in the south of England and Yorkshire - there's plenty of other areas.
In common usage where I'm from, "moot" means "irrelevant". Even if debated, and even if a result emerges from the debate, that result will have no impact on anything.
Comments
My local lists "streak frites" on its not especially French menu.
Considerable variation in North American English for "leisure" - I was taught (small town northern Canada) that it had a short e.
That's it! Thank you - I had slightly misremembered it.
I imagine they were keeping to simple ideas and words such as bread and bed. A random word from my dictionary (can't do the crossed d for voiced th) "innothtydernes" might well have been useful, but I have my doubts about its being well known. (Weakness of the bowels.)
My parents used to live along the road from a Kentish settlement called Freezingham, a placename speaking of the first settlers being Frisians.
(Although I have yet to meet a Dutch person who doesn't speak at least good English, so for a fair comparison, Mr. Izzard should have brought a friend who hadn't been studying Chaucer, to try and buy a cow from the neighbouring farmer.)
Not just the name of a game. It is a term used to describe how a story/message etc changes as it's passed from one to another. Obviously based on the game.
Nobody really knows what languages the peasants spoke in Roman Britain. It wasn't something the Romans bothered much about. Everyone has always assumed they all spoke some sort of ancestor of Welsh. There is at least one academic - but I can't remember who they are - who has argued in the last few years that at least some of the natives in south eastern Roman Britain might have already been speaking a language that was more like Anglo-Saxon than Welsh. Apparently, for all the similarities between English and Flemish/Dutch/Frisian, there are some differences that suggest English has been evolving separately since further back than c400-500 AD.
Nah, he's early modern. Middle is Pearl and Gawain and Ancrene Wisse.
The AB texts (such as those you list here) are a heavily-inflected, Anglo-Saxon influenced version of middle English. Chaucer, although a contemporary of the Gawain poet, wrote Canterbury Tales in a much less inflected, London dialect of Middle English.
And this London dialect basically became Chancery English, which basically became Early Modern, so there's some truth in calling Chaucer "early modern", but I think you go a little far. I'd be inclined to put the dividing line between Chaucer and Malory.
The general point (that Chaucer can be read in the original language by schoolchildren with a little glossing, but not much else in the way of assistance, whereas the AB texts are almost as opaque as Beowulf) is reasonable.
“The chronological boundaries of the Middle English period are not easy to define, and scholarly opinions vary. The dates that OED3 has settled on are 1150-1500. (Before 1150 being the Old English period, and after 1500 being the early modern English period.) In terms of ‘external’ history, Middle English is framed at its beginning by the after-effects of the Norman Conquest of 1066, and at its end by the arrival in Britain of printing (in 1476) and by the important social and cultural impacts of the English Reformation (from the 1530s onwards) and of the ideas of the continental Renaissance.”
Now see what you did. Instead of cleaning the house like a good LC, I have spent an hour or more down the rabbit hole of reading Ancrene Wisse!
Out of interest, when you studied your degree in English, was there a separate module for Early Modern? We had a compulsory Middle English module, and an optional Old English module, but no Early Modern, and I don't think I heard that term. The next one up, in time frame (as we looked chronologically at the stages of literature) was Renaissance (Elizabethan and Jacobean) - Marlowe, Jonson, etc. Shakespeare had a whole module to himself. I see from Wikipedia these are considered as Early Modern, but I don't remember this term being used.
We studied Chaucer in Middle English, along with Pearl and Gawain. We knew they were earlier than Chaucer, and we looked at the language differences, but they all came under the same module of Middle English. Even when we looked at the Scottish guys, Henryson and Dunbar, and specifically at how their language differed from English poets, it was all within the module of Middle English. (This was in the early 1990s, at University of London, in case teaching methods/categories have changed over time). I see Wikipedia refers to early Middle English and late Middle English, and that sounds familiar in terms of how we were taught, looking at the earlier and later poets within the Middle English category.
I'll be doing this too - this was not part of my English degree and now I'm curious!
Though where did you find it? I saw it on Amazon, but that copy is £45! Is it available online to read?
Edited a third time to say never mind, I found it!
http://www.bsswebsite.me.uk/History/AncreneRiwle/AnchoressesRule.pdf
It's amazing how hard it is to find a translation online.
Regarding Chaucer: My program placed him firmly in Middle English as well, with Shakespeare as the exemplar for Early Modern. Beowulf was, of course, Old...
Ah, thank you - I hadn't found a translation, just the original, which seemed a bit daunting!
Ah, but they're not. The Gawain poet and Chaucer were contemporaries. The language is logically older, sure, with more Old English structures and so on, but what you're really seeing are regional differences in the development of English.
Our Middle English lecturer mentioned Tolkien quite a bit, and how various Middle English texts had influenced his novels. I'm thinking now that she may well have mentioned Ancrene Wisse, but it wasn't one of the texts we studied, so I guess if she mentioned it, I didn't take it in.
It could certainly be argued that you can find the best of Tolkien's scholarship in his essay on Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad. Here's a link for anyone that's interested.
I think this is the crux of the issue here - whether we're talking about a stage of language development, or a period in history. I don't remember this distinction being made when I was studying Middle English. It is hazy in my memory now, as this was nearly 30 years ago, and I haven't read or studied Middle English stuff since. I know the main structure of the degree was chronological- modules covered literature within certain periods in history, to show how literature (not language) developed over time. I know in the Middle English module, some works were described as earlier and some as later. I don't remember all the authors we looked at - only the ones I wrote essays/exams on. I actually don't remember finding Pearl or Gawain more difficult than Chaucer - I enjoyed them far more, and the texts I used were annotated, so I remember them being relatively straightforward to read, and I also read a translation by Tolkien of Gawain, as well as the original, and also went to see an opera of it, which was great fun! We also had a very lively lecturer, who brought these texts to life. She talked about the differences in the language from Chaucer. But each author we looked at had differences in their language. But all were within the Middle English module.
Somewhere or other, I have a little book called the Cantbeworried Tales, set in the Sydney of the late 60s/early 70s and written in mock-Chaucerian by an English humorist resident here. I can remember a couplet from a description of the petty criminal court :
Importuning ladies, fresh from beds
Who paid their fines as business overheads
Loving the typo, and now I have the old song ‘The Streak’ in my head.
Don’t look Ethel!
Gawain is mostly written in alliterative verse which is an older tradition of verse writing compared to the rhyming verse of early Chaucer, which he got from French literature, or later Chaucer, which I believe he got from Italian literature. That said, the alliterative verse of Gawain, and Lsngland is written by writers with no cultural memory of what makes a good alliterative line: the way they use it it is a poor medium for a long poem.
Al, that makes sense. I guess if it's a dominant part of the curriculum, then of course finer distinctions will be made. Middle English was a constant part of our curriculum, with a couple of excellent lecturers (who also taught Old English), but not the main focus, and it seemed quite separate from the other modules - different sort of exam too, at a different time, where we had to translate passages as well as analyse them. We had a lot more lecturers focused on 18th century literature. We had a system where if we wanted to study modern literature, we had to do modules on all the periods beforehand (except Old English, as that was optional, but we still had introductory lectures on it). I really wanted to do the modern modules and the American literature module, so I was sometimes seeing earlier periods more as a means to an end!
Middle English wasn't my favourite, but the main lecturer was great - she was lively and full of energy and totally different from the other lecturers, who were mostly Oxbridge graduates and very traditional, largely male, and some of them quite stuffy without good people skills. She had been a school teacher, done her PhD a bit later in life than the norm, though really knew her stuff. But she was very focused on making Middle English interesting and accessible, so maybe didn't focus so much on the fine distinctions of categories.
Though Chaucer was referred to as Middle English when we did him for A level too, and in the university libraries, he was under the Middle English section, so I guess it was a more systemic thing too.
One point about the area was that it looked very much as if the new, English, occupants moved in respecting the existing boundaries. This may not be general across the country.
The Germanic feature is the first build, right back about 80 AD. I didn't expect that.
The (London, ne Manchester) Guardian offers this: https://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2015/jan/16/mind-your-language-moot-point
Apart from the UK use of 'mooted' as a synonym for 'proposed' it seems to me that a common thread between the UK and US issues is that if a point is moot then it doesn't matter: Brits (if I have understood things properly) think that the point has been settled, while Americans think there's no point in trying to settle it.
Practicing lawyers will also do moot courts to prepare for real upcoming arguments before an appellate court.
I have never known either of them to be used IN the UK! But then, I have only lived in the south of England and Yorkshire - there's plenty of other areas.
Same here.