I wonder if that was a copy made decades later. It’s handwritten, but the Gutenberg press wasn’t even invented until around the middle of the 1400s. According to Google, the thorn character was already losing ground in Chaucer’s time, but persisted until imported printing presses started to become commonplace, which would have been towards the end of the 1400s. So there could have been hand-printed Chaucer texts with and without the character. The character does not appear in the example text for 1500, and that seems about right.
I had to read Chaucer in its original language in college for my undergraduate degree in English many years ago.
I am fairly competent reading through the 1300s but the1200s is where I start to have difficulty.
Yes. The Normans didn’t like the non-Latin characters and discouraged their use wherever they could. When books were all hand-scribed, the copyist could make their own choices. But once books were made on presses, it was expensive to add characters to the standard Latin alphabet. I’m not sure when the first typefont was cast in England; even when the press was built locally, the characters were all made in Europe.
Non-Latin characters that were used in English before the Norman Conquest, that were later discontinued:
Æ “ash”, used for the “short A” sound.
Þ “thorn” and Ð “eth”, used for the “TH sound”. Nominally unvoiced and voiced, but often interchanged (it’s not like modern speakers distinguish the sounds well, either).
Ƿ "wynn, used for the “W sound”.
Handy info for reading Old English at
IIRC, all of our surviving Chaucer manuscripts date from after his death in 1400, often well after it, so yes, “decades later” seems likely.
I was able to manage well until 1300. (My husband recommended it to me.)
I wish this website had been available when I was teaching English as a foreign language 20-odd years ago. I could have used it to explain a lot of things my students found odd about its present form.
I was good up to 1200, but I have made a study of early English NT translations, mainly Wycliffe and Tyndale, so that helped.
This is loads of fun. Thankee!
Same. I did my capstone class on Scottish witchcraft trials as an undergraduate, so I have a good amount of experience reading English from the 16th and 17th centuries. When I hit the 15th century it becomes quite a slog.
It was set to “Detect language” and translate to English.