Geoffrey Chaucer

“ In English, accent plays a very important part; and for this reason, we may consider English speech as consisting of a succession of utterances which form, as it were, speech-waves, in which each wave or jet of breath contains a strong syllable ”

“ Verbs are distinguished as being weak or strong. In the former, the pp. (past participle) ends in -ed, -d, or -t; in the latter, it ends in -en or -e.
A simple rule is to observe that, in weak verbs, a final -e is common in the past tense, but never ends a pp. unless it is used as a plural adjective; conversely, in strong verbs, it is common (varying with -en) in the pp., but never occurs in the pt. t. singular. The frequent disregard of this usage is a great blemish in Tyrwhitt's edition of the Canterbury Tales. ”

“ We may believe that, in old times, when poetry was recited by minstrels to large assemblies, the enunciation of it was slow and deliberate, and the pauses were longer than when we now read it to a friend or to ourselves. The importance attached to suffixes denoting inflexions tends to prove this. The minstrel's first business was to be understood. Many speakers speak too fast, and make too short pauses, till experience teaches them better.
Hence there is no need to elide a vowel at the caesura ”

“ We have now to consider the possibility, that Chaucer sometimes dropped the initial syllable of the latter part of a line, after the caesura; a licence of which Lydgate availed himself to a painful extent. It is clear that his ear disliked it; yet there seem to be just a few cases that cannot fairly be explained away, the MSS. being sadly unanimous. It is better to learn the truth than to suppress what we should ourselves dislike. ”

“ The Glossary has been compiled on a much larger scale than any hitherto attempted, wherein the part of speech of almost every word is duly marked, and every verbal form is sufficiently parsed. A special feature of the Glossary is the exclusion from it of non-Chaucerian words and forms; and in order to secure this result, separate Glossaries are given of the chief words occurring in Fragments B and C of the Romaunt of the Rose and in Gamelyn; and we are thus enabled to detect a marked difference in the vocabulary employed in these pieces from that which was employed by Chaucer [2] . ”

“ In the interest of both, it is highly desirable that Chaucer's genuine works should be kept apart from those which were recklessly associated with them in the early editions, and even in modern editions have been but imperfectly suppressed. It was also desirable, or rather absolutely necessary, that the recent advances in our knowledge of Middle-English grammar and phonetics should be rightly utilised, and that no verbal form should be allowed to appear which would have been unacceptable to a good scribe of the fourteenth century [1] . ”

“ If I may beg leave to offer my own view of the forms of Chaucer's substantives of the strong declensions, I should be inclined to explain his usages in the following way.
Let us put aside the weak declension, and the etymology of the A.S. words, and let us look at the actual forms of the singular nouns. And, since the genitive case, in Chaucer, usually has a form of its own, let us consider the nom., acc., and dative only.
All the representative words given in Sievers (A.S. Gram. § 238, &c.) can be collected under a few general types, for the present purpose. The fem. sb. giefu had the accus. ”

“ Similarly, such a word as alighted, in which a strong syllable is situated between two weak ones, may be called an 'amphibrach.' The amphibrach plays a highly important part in English verse, though it is usual not to mention it at all. I shall use these three terms, iamb, trochee, and amphibrach, only occasionally, and for the convenience of the names; it being now well understood that I merely mean such groups of strong and weak syllables as occur in the English words alight, lighter, and alighted. ”

“ The etymology of words is given occasionally, in the case of some of the more difficult words. Languages are cited in the usual manner, as A.F. for Anglo-French, O.F. for Old French, A.S. for Anglo-Saxon, and the like.
A large number of references are given, but they are by no means exhaustive. I have tried to include nearly all words to which any interest is likely to be attached. In the case of verbal forms, every form is duly parsed. References to 'notes' are to the Notes in the present edition. ”

“ In the case of weak verbs, which include a large number of verbs of Anglo-French origin, much depends upon the form and even upon the length of the stem. The standard suffix for the pt. t. is -de, and for the pp., -d; but this necessarily becomes -te (pp. -t) after a voiceless consonant and in some other cases, especially after l and gh. A third variety of form is caused by the frequent occurrence of -e- before the final -de or -d, due, usually, to the form of the infinitive mood; and, in long words especially, the form -ede is frequently reduced to -ed. ”

“ For further details, see Ten Brink's work on Chaucers Sprache und Verskunst. It may be as well to say that he has remarkably failed to understand the effect of the caesura, and is much troubled by the occurrence there of extra syllables. Yet this was the necessary result of Chaucer's copying French models.
The explanation is simple. The caesura implies a pause. But elision can only take place where there is NO pause. Hence the caesural pause ALWAYS prevents elision. Hence, also, there is often a redundant syllable here, just as there is at the end of the line. ”

“ Suppression of syllables. We find, not only in Chaucer, but elsewhere, that light or very weak syllables do not always count for the scansion; so that, whilst, on the one hand, we can read Cáunterbùry as four syllables, with a secondary accent on u (as in A 27) , there is no difficulty in pronouncing it, as many do, as if it were Cáunterb'rỳ, with the secondary accent on the y (as in A 16, A 22) [78] . It seems hardly necessary to enlarge upon this part of the subject; it is sufficient to say that mere counting of syllables will not explain the scansion of English poetry. ”

“ A good example occurs in the case of the words sea and see. The former, in Chaucer, is (sae) or (sèè) , with long open e; whilst the latter is (séé) , with long close e. Both were written see in M.E.; with the result, that the words were spelt alike at that time, though pronounced differently; but are spelt differently now, though pronounced alike. The difference in spelling is due to an Elizabethan habit, when the two sounds were purposely distinguished; and it may be remarked that such words as are spelt with ea are precisely those which still have a peculiar pronunciation in Ireland. ”

“ But I use y finally, as in mod. English. Ex. many (man·i) .
i, y, long; (ii) . The scribes prefer the symbol y; hence I use it almost throughout. Ex. byte (bii·tə) , bite; delyt (delii·t) , delight.
i consonantal, I (j) . There was no symbol for j in M.E., though the sound was common, in words of French origin. The scribes usually wrote I, when the sound was initial, as in Iay (jei) , a jay. In the middle of a word, it is not distinguishable from the vowel, except by the fact that it precedes a vowel or diphthong, as in conioyne (konjoi·nə) , to conjoin. ”

“ Hence Chaucer had, ready to his use, two forms of this word. One was the Southern dèèd, with open ē, from A.S. dǣd; the other was the Midland dééd, with close ē; and, as the Midland dialect was then rapidly gaining the ascendency, he could hardly go wrong if he sometimes used the more popular form. Chaucer knew nothing of etymology, but he knew how words were pronounced by his cotemporaries; a fact which sufficiently explains his habits.
In order to complete this part of the case, it is necessary to add that the M.E. ē which results from A.S. ēa is ALWAYS open [31] . ”

“ Lounsbury is perfectly justified in contending that 'there is not the slightest proof that Chaucer had a knowledge of the existence' of the Decameron. Reasonable carefulness will certainly shew that he was wholly ignorant of it; and the notion that Chaucer borrowed the general plan of his Tales from that of his Italian predecessor, is wholly baseless; the plans are, in fact, more remarkable for their divergence than for their similarity. The only apparent point of contact between Chaucer and the Decameron is in the Tale of Griselda ”

“ Whatever be the right explanation, we must set aside leve, leave, as an exceptional word. So also eve, eve, A.S. ǣfen, Mercian ēfen, has a variable vowel; see Sweet, O.E. Texts, p. 602.
§ 36. Having now considered the doubtful cases, which may be altogether set aside, it remains to draw up the list of words in which the quality of the long e, at least in Troilus, admits of no doubt. The result gives us a valuable set of test-rimes, by which the genuineness of a poem attributed to Chaucer may be investigated. Of course, a few divergences may admit of explanation ”

“ The word his (hiz) may have its initial h aspirated, when standing alone; but in the phrase his shoures, it is taken along with shoures, loses its accent and its initial h, and becomes (iz) . Words are much affected by the manner in which they are thus grouped together. I denote this grouping by the use of a hyphen, and mark the accented syllables by a sloping stroke over every accented vowel; as is usual [25] . The elided final [xxxi] e is denoted by (') . There is no elision at the medial pause; see below (§ 116) . The medial pause is here denoted by a sloping stroke, as in the Ellesmere MS. ”

“ In unemphatic words, it was also frequently mute; so that hit was frequently written it, as in modern English.
i, y, short; (i) . Ex. him (him) . Owing to the indistinctness of the old written character for i, when preceding or following m or n, the scribes frequently wrote y instead of it; as in myd, nyl, hym, dynt. But as this indistinctness does not reappear in modern printing, I have usually restored the true forms mid, nil, him, dint; which enables me to use y as a symbol for long i, without confusion. ”

“ Plural: 2 pers. -eth, -th, sometimes -e [66] . The rest of the Mood is supplied from the subjunctive.
Infinitive: -en, (often) -e. The gerundial infinitive, preceded by the prep, to, and usually expressive of purpose, has a special form only in a very few instances, as to bene, to be; to done, to do; to sene, to see, A 1035; to seyne, to say; for which to doon, to seen or to see, to seyn or to seye, also occur. In other verbs, it does not differ from the ordinary infinitive. The true infinitive occurs without the prep. to, and remains in mod. E. in such expressions as I can sing, I might go. ”

“ If, as seems to be proposed, we remove the word hath, and read good-e, we get: 'As shal the good-e man that therfor payed'; which rimes just as well as before, payed being an admissible form of the preterite, as well as payde. But then the epithet goode becomes comparatively otiose.
In the Legend, 1696, it is maintained that wroghte is a past participle. It is surely a preterite, the word they, i.e. the besiegers, being understood. This is a little forced, but it cannot be helped. To take it as a pp. gives no sense ”

“ He naturalised the famous seven-line stanza, employed by Machault in several poems, one of which evidently furnished the refrain of Against Women Unconstant; and this is good evidence in favour of the genuineness of this Balade. On account of the great interest attaching to this metre, I here transcribe Machault's Balade in full. And I take occasion to remark, at the same time, that it illustrates the absurdity of an unlucky suggestion that has been lately made, viz. that 'all Balades must needs have an envoy, and that envoys to some of Chaucer's Balades must have been lost [53] .' ”

“ For the sound of th, modern English may be taken as the guide; and the same remark applies to the distinction between f and v, and to the variable sound of s. Moreover, every letter should be distinctly sounded; the k in knee (knéé) and the w in wryte (wrii·tə) were still in use in the time of Chaucer, though now only preserved in the written forms.
§ 23. It will readily be understood that the M.E. vowel-sounds were intermediate between those of Anglo-Saxon and of modern English. ”

“ There are several cases in which the rimes are rather to be considered as permissible than exact. The frequent riming of go (gao) with do (doo) has already been noted. Similarly, owing to the paucity of words ending in open ē, the word sèè, sea, is allowed to rime with close ē. ”

“ We have noted, however, that Chaucer varied from his French models in making the place of the caesura moveable; and the result was to bring the two portions of each line into closer [xcvii] relationship. Hence he takes great care to make his redundant syllables as light as possible; thus preparing the way for later authors, who came to regard a redundant syllable as a thing to be sparingly used. Moreover, when they did use it, inasmuch as the original value of the caesura was little known, they inserted such a redundant syllable in other positions; in order to avoid monotony. ”

“ In such a case, some scribes write werkis for werkes, to make the rime more complete, but it is quite needless, as there is no necessity for an absolute coincidence of vowel-sound in a mere unaccented syllable. In Lenvoy a Scogan, 15, it would be quite absurd to alter goddes to goddis (!) , merely because it rimes with forbod'is; the really weak part of the rime is in the linking of the short o in goddes, with the longer o in forbode. For the same reason, the rime of lyte is with dytees (HF. 621) is good enough ”