Not Modern English but Close Enough

While reading Old English in the epic poem Beowulf it was difficult to discern that the word ‘Eorlas’ means ‘Earls’ in what I will be referring to in this blog post as Modern English.  While it was easier to figure out that the word ‘gōd’ means ‘good’ in Modern English. **I would like to note that when I use the term Modern English I do not mean Early Modern English, instead I mean the form of English that is commonly used today.** After taking a closer look at the Old English version of Beowulf and Canterbury Tales in Middle English it became a little bit easier to figure out what certain words meant but my confidence in my translation of many of the words on the page was still nowhere close to what it is when reading Modern English or even when I read in French, a language that I have been studying for a little over five years.Does this make Old English and Middle English as foreign of languages as French, Spanish, and German?

Beginning to read Canterbury Tales was almost as scary as reading Beowulf at first, if not scarier because at least Beowulf was completely translated on the next page, where as Canterbury Tales just had a few words translated in the margin. I was able to comprehend the text especially the first few lines “whan that Aprill with his shoures sote/ The droghte of Marche hath perched to the rote” (ll.1-2). Many of these words look very similar to the Modern English counterparts such as ‘whan’ meaning ‘when’ and ‘droghte’ meaning ‘drought.’ Once I looked at the text as being an older form of English verses an the entirely different language that it had seemed to be at first it became a lot easier. I found that more and more words automatically translated themselves into Modern English in my head the more I read.

After learning how to pronounce words in Middle English, I was amazed at how much easier it was to comprehend the Canterbury Tales when I was reading it aloud, even though it sounded like the monk's chant from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. After rereading the General Prologue while listening to it, I was amazed that I understood about eighty percent of what I read. When comparing the language in Beowulf and Canterbury Tales it is apparent that even though the text of the Canterbury Tales is in Middle English it is a lot closer to the version of English that we read today than the Old English of Beowulf is. Many of the words in Middle English look similar to the words we use today though the spelling of many of them is a little different. For example: “that fro the tyme that he first bigan/ To ryden out, he loved chivalrye,/ Trouthe and honour, freedom and curteisye” (ll. 44-46). The word freedom is the same as it is today however the word honour has an extra letter and the word trouthe has two extra letters. I’m not sure there are specific words that I wish we still used but I wish that we kept the original spelling of many of these words. 

This is what I think of when I am read the Canterbury Tales out loud, it certainly is not Modern English...but it is close enough: