flemmings | Oh come swiftly, sweetest Lord, and take my soul to Thee

I'm lost for words.

Excuse me while I go and speak the French of Stratford-atte-Bowe. (My mother loves quoting that.)

How far back does English cattiness about one's French accent go? 700 years and counting.

And even further, if you believe Monty Python.

Oh dear...it is rather despairing.

I'm just uh-uh whut? *sigh*

Ahh, the heedless young living in their eternal present, where 'long long ago' means 'before 1985.' I don't know which floors me worst- the 'bad spelling' English had **1200 years ago** or the utter cluelessness as to where D&D came from in the first place.

I know...maybe I should show her some of my girl's work. I mean does this person not know anything about such things as phonics/phoetics...and did she start off spelling perfectly???

I love looking at my mum's old literature text's, with all the lovely spelling. I think the way some of the way the things were spelt added a kind of tune and songlike qualities to some of the poetry and even literature. Sure some of it made me feel like I was in over my head. But I loved them all the same.

It's like being in a playground of words. So much fun. I feel sad so sad that some people look at it the way they have. I think I have even more fun when I look at Shahrazad's work between the age of 5 and 7 and how some of it is so similar...and I'm like Wow!!! it's so cool. That is be me being weird maybe.

I do feel just that slightest little bit sad that she learnt how to spell at last. ^__^

It's kind of like I'm sorry English spelling got standardized- sort of, in a way- because Elizabethan English is not only all over the map spelling-wise, its style also has this rambunctious energy that doesn't quite know where it's going and occasionally falls downstairs. Err- like a 5 year old, you know?

But then it went all Latinate and 'Latin has grammar rules so we must too' and 'Latin has balanced periodic sentences so we must too' and it was a lot less fun. Though I fancy chatspeak will be bringing it back again with its 'u r weerd' constructions.

LOLOL!
Studying Canterbury Tales was pure hell for me but that's only because I loathe rhyming couplets. The stories themselves were fine as was the language. Or maybe I developed my loathing of couplets AFTER studying Chaucer?

Beowulf quote had me in stitches. Ahaha! Ewww like, some geek totally touched himself when he wrote this. GRODY! How can I possibly understand something a GEEK likes?

See, there's the Great Vowel Shift between Chaucer and us, so half the time Chaucer doesn't even rhyme if you think of the words in modern English, and the rest of the time you need to be thinking hard as to how these words are pronounced anyway. His rhyming couplets don't bother me nearly as much as early Shakespeare for precisely that reason.

What was the great vowel shift?

*stares at you in horror*

(Hush, love, she's an engineer. They do things like the free electron theory of metals, resistivity, and the band theory of solids.)

There are many webpages devoted to the Great Vowel Shift (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift) and they all get into phonics and areas of the throat very fast. But essentially, over a period of several hundred years, the pronunciation of vowels shifted about. Canterbury Tales starts out, middle Englishly: Whanne that Aprille with its shoures sote. The a's are all pretty much the a of aw; IIRC shoures is uu, sote is a long o. Whanne's a turned into the short e of when; Aprille's a became a long a; the uu sound of shoures became the ow of showers; and the o of swote became a long e that no longer rhymers with root.

Oh! So Whanne that Aprille with its shoures sote means when that April with it's showers soft, but is pronounced like whawn thaw-t awpril with its shuu-res shoot? LOL! That reads like the Scottish making fun of Scottish.

I've been reading The Languages of China about how linguists were trying to piece out how things used to be pronounced and how the writing that's left behind has no pronunciation associated with it and what a horrible problem that is and how all the old poetry can't be read in modern Chinese and rhyme properly and ... LOL! Of course I have no clue what any of the notations mean, it's like reading a very interesting mystery novel, only factual, and full of some kind of unexplained code. I need non-fiction books on tape, or something.

Showers sweet, actually. There's a very good reason why pre-vowel shift English, or even Elizabethan English, sounds like Scots English. The Highland Scots at least spoke English as a second language and so earlier pronunciations got calcified in the form of English they spoke. Equally they (like other parts of England) were more cut off from the south part of the country around London where the standard form of English was developing, and so older pronunciations remained in the English they spoke. All of which is changing with television but naturally.

The old Chinese poetry I don't even want to think about, not after

paleaswater's disquisitions on how a certain sound couldn't be used during the reign of the Emperor whose name contained that sound and so you had to substitute other sounds that were close but no cigar and so you can tell when certain poems date because the normal rhyme you'd expect isn't there- Oh that hanzi must be read as kung2 to rhyme, though it really should be yang1, this must be the reign of Yang-whatsisface. Arghhh.

But I'm an engineer and things like the vowel shift make sense. It's the literature that defeats me, every time.

Yes, but you're a British engineer, and so have come across the Great Vowel Shift somewhere in the course of your education. American engineers are less likely to have heard of the concept, if only because American schools specialize more. Sad story from my time in Japan- the Scots girl was telling the American guy about celebrating Rabbie Burns' day and he was looking a little blank. "You *do* know Robert Burns?' she asked, and he said, "No, sorry, I took business in university."

Ahahahaha! Sorry I have to interupt...- That is quite funny!!!

"Sad story from my time in Japan- the Scots girl was telling the American guy about celebrating Rabbie Burns' day and he was looking a little blank. "You *do* know Robert Burns?' she asked, and he said, "No, sorry, I took business in university." "

It was strange when I first touched English soil, I had real problems with London, English. Especially pertaining to my name. At some level it horrified me (and did interesting things to my stomach). I got used to it.

Years later,I chose to do my University years, North of the divide. When I got to Yorkshire, I learnt that people could and do say my name right! It was like coming home almost. But not quite.

I loved the accents, although I still can't always tell Lancashire from Yorkshire and sucker for the Scots. The Black Country (Midlands-ish) floors me as it sounds like another language (gratingly so) entirely. The sing-song of the Cornish can be lovely, depending how far West you go and the Welsh also sound like another country but gentler on the ear than the sound of the Midlands.

I cannot comment on the Irish having not have enough contact with them but I think the Gaelic/Celt/Pictish connections make them charming all the same to me as the Scots although they may beg to differ. ^_~

....and the thing about Beowulf really really gets my ...something!!!! Ugh-uhg huh!??? Every time!!!

^__^

*facepalms* Umm...I don't understand but maybe that is for the best. The Beowulf quote won my WTF! face this morning.

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I agree, it's not instant gratification- but sheesh. Chaucer is *hard*? Langland is hard. The Pearl poet is hard. (He writes in fricking Stanley Holloway Lancashirese. Well- Midlands. You know what I mean. And I share your groans on just how long it takes to prepare those. As long as my Greek texts, practically.)

But Chaucer wrote the London dialect that's the basis of our English. It's no big deal to figure *that* one out.

Granted, stage-handing for the medieval drama group helped too. The ear, it's all in the ear. Sound it out and you can usually make a guess at the meaning. Which common wisdom turns out to be very useful for dealing with the more mangled forms of male Japanese. Wakarya-- well, sounds like wakereba, so that's what it must be.

I liked Beowulf better than anything else we read in 12th grade English precisely because it had 'bad' spelling, gore, and monsters. (Oh, I did like Macbeth. But that had its share of gore too).

Which is perhaps just as ignorant in the grand scheme of things, but I'm impressed by anything that can entertain a high school senior in the last class of the afternoon.

Macbeth was too full of Famous Passages by the time I came to it to be rivetting. It's actually a problem, doing the play- audiences tend to giggle.

I'm not a keen mad fan of Beowulf- lyric over epic always, even if The Wanderer is probably not a lyric, and Widsith which I adore is nothing but a list of Who's Who. But to reject works written a millennium ago because the *spelling's* different takes a serious amount of cultural and temporal insularity. 'If it didn't happen in my country in my time it's not worth looking at.'

Oh come swiftly, sweetest Lord, and take my soul to Thee

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