Middle English 中古英文

[fenlan]

These are the opening lines of the famous prologue to the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. Please find attached audio file - me reading Middle English. Translation and notes below.

1: Whan that aprill with his shoures soote

2: The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,

3: And bathed every veyne in swich licour

4: Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

5: Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth

6: Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

7: Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

8: Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne,

9: And smale foweles maken melodye,

10: That slepen al the nyght with open ye

11: (so priketh hem nature in hir corages);

12: Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,

13: And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,

14: To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;

15: And specially from every shires ende

16: Of engelond to caunterbury they wende,

17: The hooly blisful martir for to seke,

18: That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

This is the standard translation into poetic modern English:

When April with his showers sweet with fruit

The drought of March has pierced unto the root

And bathed each vein with liquor that has power

To generate therein and sire the flower;

When Zephyr also has, with his sweet breath,

Quickened again, in every holt and heath,

The tender shoots and buds, and the young sun

Into the Ram one half his course has run,

And many little birds make melody

That sleep through all the night with open eye

(So Nature pricks them on to ramp and rage)-

Then do folk long to go on pilgrimage,

And palmers to go seeking out strange strands,

To distant shrines well known in sundry lands.

And specially from every shire's end

Of England they to Canterbury wend,

The holy blessed martyr there to seek

Who helped them when they lay so ill and weal

Note: Zephirus is the North Wind. Also note that Chaucer wrote in iambic pentameters. An iamb is a short syllable followed by a long syllable. Pentameter means this is repeated 5 times, so: .- .- .- .- .- where . means short syllable and - means long syllable. (The metre can be reversed, as -.-.-.-.-.) So it should sound rhythmic when read properly: WHAN that APrill WITH his SHOUres SOOTe, the DROGHT(e) of MARCH hath PERCed TO the ROOTe. (The final e is pronounced, except before vowels). Some syllable are skipped to preserve the rhythm, eg Zeph'rus.

[chenpv]

OMG，I feel so depressed when seeing all these middle English. I cannot read a word of it. If i was not told in advance, I would have taken it for another language. From another thread I know its designated for high school students in US. so it seems that my English stays at junior school level in a US evaluation system.

[fenlan]

Actually I am not sure that middle school students study this. Not all graduates from English departments have read Middle English. As you know Shakespeare, who wrote in the late 1500s, can be understood by English people, at least in terms of the general sense, but the exact meaning of individual sentences requires consulting a glossary. Middle English is ever worse - the Canterbury Tales were written in the late 1300s, and some passages are easier to work out than others. I don't think all native speakers would realise that "vertu" in this passage had the earlier meaning of "power", rather than "virtue". I am going to post some Old English in a new thread.

[Altair]

OMG?i feel so depressed when seeing all of these middle english. i cannot read a word of it. if i was not told in advance, i would have taken it for another language. From another thread i know its designated for high school students in US. so it seems that my english stays at junior school level in a US evaluation system.

This passage is not "junior school level" English. It is merely a variety of English that many high school students briefly study. English speakers who do not make a special study of this English generally cannot understand it at all. The spelling, grammar, and literary references are all too strange.

One of the things teachers use this passage for is to teach their students to recite it with the presumed Middle English pronunciation. During that time, the spelling was pretty phonetic, and the long vowels especially were pronounced quite differently than in Modern English. Generally, they had values similar to Italian, Spanish, and French (and even pinyin). In the passage, I can justify the presence of every letter, except perhaps for the second "l" in "aprill." (Shift in stress?) The spelling of Modern English later became quite chaotic as the pronunciation changed and different dialects of English were mixed together.

By the way, I should say that the "translation" is Modern English only in the technical sense. It uses a great deal of archaic words, word order, and grammar that only highly people highly educated in traditional literature would understand. Because I studied the Middle English passage in school, there are even a few cases where I understand the Middle English words better than the "Modern English" ones. ("ramp"? "weal"?)

Note: Zephirus is the North Wind.

Are you sure? I learned that Zephirus was the West Wind, and that is what I saw on one site I googled.

Other references that might be obscure in the passage are those to the "ram," and "palmers." The "ram" is a reference to the constellation "Aries." The pilgrimage season apparently started in late spring when the sun was halfway through the constellation Aries. "Palmers" were pilgrims to certain religious sites. The passage refers to pilgrims travelling to the site where Archbiship Thomas Beckett was martyred in Canterbury Cathedral, England, by representatives of the king. Praying for his help was thought to cure the sick and some pilgrims may have taken an oath to undertake the pilgrimage if they recovered from an illness.

[beirne]

What I found helped was reading out loud in the Middle English style. It of course doesn't help on words like vertu, but overall I seemed to get the flow of the passage better.

[Dennis]

Fenlan try Old english , German or Dutch

[fenlan]

Altair, you were right in everything you said. Zephirus is the West Wind. I looked it up in the OED, but Zephirus is not in the OED. (I pasted in the translation from the Internet, but I think "ill and weak" was probably what was intended, not "ill and weal", which seems a contradiction.) And the translation is designed to rhyme in modern English, and that accounts for some of its odd language. The only point I would make is that high school students probably *could* cope with Middle English if the government made a decision to stress such things, but the tendency of Western governments is to stress language for utilitarian purposes. Similarly it is a political decision in China whether to teach classical Chinese. In the 1920s many had hoped that a baihuawen be created shorn of the chengyu and wenyanwen, but it was not to be...

[fenlan]

Dennis I have studied a whole book of Old English, although this was some time ago and I am a little rusty. Please find my old English audio file elsewhere.