Prologue vs. Tale

Reading the Wife of Bath's Prologue was a rather arduous task. I was not expecting it to be so long! I opened up the book thinking "Oh, it is a prologue, 3-4 pages max, no big deal". Then I actually started reading. By the fifth page I was like "huh, a little longer than expected, but hopefully not too much longer". Then, by the eighth page, I was flipping through the book to figure out when exactly the actual tale began. About twenty pages later, I found the headline indicating that the prologue was finished and the tale was starting. I was kind of like:

It was not that the prologue was bad. On the contrary, I actually really enjoyed reading it, but reading Middle English can be incredibly time consuming and it took awhile. Naturally, when it came time to read the actual tale, I was expecting something way longer than the prologue. I was actually quite confused when I discovered that it was much shorter. Cue another cute cat meme:

I do not know, I guess it is because I am used to the prologue being a lot shorter than the actual story, but Chaucer kind of threw me for a loop there. Looking back on it now, I am actually quite glad that he did it. I really enjoy the Wife of Bath. I think she is a very unique character and has a lot of interesting things to say. By listening to her prologue, which was completely about her life, I feel like I got to know her a lot better. I really wish my high school let us read her tale. I always knew, even then, that I liked her, but I enjoy her even more now after hearing more about her life.

I know there is some debate over Chaucer's opinion of the Wife of Bath. I think, given that he dedicated so much time to telling her story, that he almost would of had to. I do not really write creatively, but when I had to for school I could never write about a character I did not like. Chaucer spent so much time making sure the audience really knows this character. Granted, it could have been because he enjoyed poking fun at her, but why put so much effort into a character that people could not learn anything from? Furthermore, given that he made her prologue (the portion that was about her life) so much longer than her tale, I think it puts a lot more emphasis on her personal story. I think Chaucer really wanted people to pay attention to her personal story. While the tale was nice, I really did enjoy the prologue so much more. Given how much shorter it is, the tale seems almost like a side note, not the actually point. I don't know, this is just my opinion.

The Great Vowel Shift

Well I for one found Middle English to be entirely different languages from Modern English when I first saw it, and I know many people in this class agreed and may still agree. Now that we have learned to read it (while I still struggle) it seems like it would be much simpler had that been the way I first learned English. Words are said very much like they look, like Dr. MB’s example of father and how the “a” sounds more like “ah”, yet when we say the alphabet me say it more as “ay” then its literal sound. So even though it has gotten easier as we go, it still makes me question many things. Like "why does it take me and hour to read twenty lines in this book," then I found out why. 

I find this meme to be a nice way of saying that I can't be lazy and rely on Modern English translations of The Canterbury Tales to get me through it. It just loses meaning without us having to struggle for over an hour to read a small amount. 

But seriously, Middle English does have a large amount of similaries to Modern English whether I can find them or not. Every line has at least one word that I know (or think I know). 

While this is true in many cases that I am very wrong when I think a word means something and it's not even close, but even just saying things out loud how they are supposed to sound does wonders for understanding words. Rather than writing about the similarities between the two versions of English though I chose to write about the reason Middle English shifted into what we call Modern English. Basically it all come down to The Great Vowel Shift (insert announcer voice here), which if I may say so sounds way more exciting then it is really. The original spelling of words in old and Middle English came from the Latin alphabet that matched their letters to the sounds of a word. Then during the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries there was a change in the sounds of vowels in spelling of words. Its biggest impacts to the sounds of words came in the sounds of long vowels. The word we say as "sheep" today may have been spelled the same in Middle English, yet it was said more as "shape". Then by the eighteenth century that had changed. While historians know how it changed no one seems to know why exactly people changed the ways they formed words. Especially during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there was a drastic change to the sounds of words. Basically to make a confusing explanation much more simple: the way that people formed the words (the way they moved their mouths to create a sound) changed from a lower articulation for example "boat" where the tongue moves to the back of the mouth to create a word it began to move up like in the word "beet" where the tounge goes forward to make the sound. I swear if you say the words out loud you notice a definite change in the position of your mouth. The words shifted from a low articulation of long vowels to a high articulation over time. Since the changes made words sounds very different from their roots people attempted to create a new alphabet more fitting of the sounds words made. People like John Hart (who I think Dr. MB mentioned) wanted to make a more phonetic sounding alphabet where spellings were purely based off of letters sounds to simplify the language. So a very long and complicated explanation later we can only somewhat understand this concept. A centuries long journey entirely based off of people deciding to articulate their words different for no apparent reason brings us to Modern English. 

The Great Vowel Shift -- Brief Note on Language." The Great Vowel Shift -- Brief Note on Language. Harvard, n.d. Web. 20 Sept. 2015.