The Great Vowel Shift, Chaucer, and Caxton

Do go spend some time reading Melinda Menzer's excellent site on the Great Vowel Shift. (If you've read the reading for Tuesday, can you identify the term for how "Do" is used in the previous sentence?)

Great Vowel Shift!!!!

• one of the kookiest things to happen to the English language since proto-Germanic moved the accent off the end of the words.
• Melinda Menzer has an excellent web site that lets you hear the differences and talks through the stages of the GVS. It also has a little dialogue that you can listen to to hear the sounds change in speech. You need Quicktime on your machine (I don’t know if library machines will have this or not).
• all the vowels sounds moved up in the mouth, except the top front and back, which dropped, centered, and became dipthongs (I->ai, for instance).
• probably this happened for prestige reasons. Several dialects were in contact in London, remember. Some of them pronounced different letters differently, so that certain words were homophones (like around here, bowl and boll can be). This caused other speakers to change their own speech to differentiate themselves. Still, it’s a striking change for the language to undergo.
• It began around 1450-1500, and was progressing through the early modern period (in Shakespeare, “eat” and “ate” are homophones, for instance).
• This is why ME sounds so odd to us. The GVS changed English pronunciation drastically, even after orthography had been set.

Chaucer

• One of the most important literary figures from the Middle English period, Chaucer was the first English poet whose work inspired national sentiment about the English language and its literary potential.
• He was middle-class—his father was a wine merchant, and he served as a Customs official in London.
• At the time of his life, the war with France had gotten rather bitter, so that French was no longer as popular
• Chaucer’s major work is The Canterbury Tales, a set of stories that are told by fictional pilgrims (including one named Chaucer) on their way to the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. This site itself was a locus of some national feeling—the origin and center of the Church in England, and a saint who was local but highly venerated.
• The works are in some ways drawing on a set of “estates satire”—a very formalized set of portraits of people from different levels of society. Many critics have felt that Chaucer’s pilgrims are taking that tradition and moving it towards what we now call “realistic” characters. Some critics, however, maintain that his portraits are all entirely conventional.
• at any rate, the Tales, as well as several other short and long poems of Chaucer’s were hugely popular, and circulate in several manuscripts, some of which are richly illustrated
  
• But manuscript transmission carries with it problems of accuracy, as we see in Chaucer’s poem “Adam Scriveyn” (Adam the Scribe) (handout). It also doesn’t circulate as widely, even though scribal workshops seem to be coming into fashion to provide books for wealthy, middle-class patrons. Often one would read aloud from a manuscript; early punctuation was probably an aid to audible reading.

William Caxton

• About 100 years after Chaucer’s death, William Caxton introduced to England one of the most revolutionary inventions in the history of Europe—the printing press.
• Caxton didn’t invent the press, but he saw the business possibilities in it. With the expansion of a wealthier middle class, the literate population was growing. Manuscript production was very expensive; books could be produced more cheaply.
• Early books were made to look like manuscripts. The decorated initials were drawn in and colored by hand (the origin of modern paragraph indentation).
• The effect of printing on language was to retard spelling change. Writing slows language change in the first place; the introduction of texts to an ever-expanding section of the population really slowed it down.
• Caxton wrote and spelled in a way that reflects his Westminster location, using in the London dialect. As rival presses sprang up, they also centered in London. So while in Middle English we have manuscripts from all over preserving several dialects, in the early modern period we don’t have all that evidence.
• Texts became somewhat more stable—although printed versions of a text could differ from each other, the variety is much less than hand-copied manuscripts.
• As the renaissance draws on, people even begin to argue a need for spelling reform—a sure sign that orthography was becoming fixed even as the GVS was continuing to shape pronunciation
• Words begin to become “reified”—become “things” rather than supposedly immediate and translucent referents to the concept they convey.