I think we have a winner.
I mean, if we can sing a hymn that waa obvoiusly written pre-vowel shift, then Joe Undergrad should be able to grok a modern transliteration of Chaucer.
My impression is that spelling reflected pronunciation until the printing press locked spelling mid-vowel-shift (while pronunciation continued to drift). I agree with your larger point - use modern spelling for Chaucer (except for linguistics classes)
We got a rhotic S now?
“Life, liberty, and the purfuit of happineff”?!
I’m not up on the rules for when one used long-s versus short-s. I do know that words could contain both.
Note that the long s is not an f. It lacks the crossbar.
I think it was used as a terminal to a syllable, never as an initial.
@Fretful_Porpentine likely knows the answer.
The long S definitely appears at the beginning of words at least some of the time – there John Donne’s “The Flea” is engaging in some visual punning with the words “suck” and “fuck” in the second image on this page, for example, and I think other poets also make the same joke! I think you’re right that you most often see the long S in the middle of words, and almost never at the end, though, and I suspect it has something to do with the practicalities of typesetting and making sure the letters aren’t crowding or knocking into each other.
The original spelling matters if you’re going to read Chaucer out loud – “swalwe” from your example would be pronounced “SWAL-wuh” rather than “swallow,” and “koude” and “make” both need to be pronunced with two syllables (KOO-duh and MAH-kuh) for the meter to work. This isn’t an issue with Shakespeare, because our silent Es were silent for him as well. With prose works from Chaucer’s era, like this e-text of Julian of Norwich, editors sometimes do modernize spelling.
Yeah, I heard that bit, too. And, that’s the only thing I remember, including the name and the artist.
ETA: Google is your friend. Stan Freeberg Presents the United States of America.
Should have remembered that. Love Freeberg. It ain’t Christmas without Green Chri$tma$!
“Turning in other directions can be accomplished by using a magnetized centerboard and ocean currents, since a current flowing through a magnetic field induces a Laplace force.”
Title text:
Applying renormalization to bullies successfully transformed Pete & Pete’s Endless Mike into Finite Mike.
Ooh! Loving how esoteric this one is.
“169 is a baker’s gross.”
In the old days, you would pay for a baker’s dozen with a baker’s shilling, which was worth 13 pence.
Makes about as much sense as the guinea – 21 shillings.
That’s what made me think of it, but off the top of my head I wasn’t sure if it was 20+1 or 12+1, so I thought maybe they already had a “baker’s X” in the currency. Ridiculous in any case!
Sorta funny how the US had one of the first decimalized currencies, back when the UK still had their absurd system.
And then decided never to use decimal systems ever again.
I would think a Bakers New Years Eve would be better as Dec 32nd
Alfred E. Neuman:
If a “baker’s dozen” is thirteen, is a “politician’s dozen” eleven?
In the more arcane corners of poetry studies, you’ll find the “poulter’s measure,” which alternates lines of 12 and 14 syllables.
The guinea was a coin, not a unit of money. Long story short they got minted for convenience in foreign trade but ended up circulating domestically.