Re: CHAT: Middle English (was: Ungrammaticalisation)
| From: | Tom Wier <artabanos@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Monday, July 19, 1999, 21:10 |
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1John Fisher wrote:
> In message <3792F094.985F77E5@...>, Tom Wier
> <artabanos@...> writes
>
> >No, it's Middle English. The irony is that even though spoken Middle English
> >would be basicly unintelligible to the modern English speaker, Chaucer and
> >Caxton
> >can still be studied in the original with only a little help
>
> For comparison with Tom's bit of Beowulf here is a really famous bit of
> Middle English, the start of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which in my day
> we studied in the original in school.
Yeah, that's a really good example of what we're talking about. The
thing is, if there had been continuity between Prenorman and Postnorman
political structures, we'd probably be able to read Old English too, since
the Norman basicly imposed a French spelling system on very different
language, which is always bad no matter what languages you're talking
about.
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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704
<http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
"Things just ain't the way they used to was."
- a man on the subway
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