Quote:
Originally Posted by ekbell
I do have a version of Chaucer's tales that takes a middle route between Middle English spelling and rewriting the tales ( http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/we...phy/murphy.htm with spelling mostly modernized but the language otherwise unchanged and a reasonable level of glossing and footnoting. I find this a good medium between the orginal spelling which requires more work then I am currently willing to put into reading and modern rewritings. |
Chaucer is rather different. He's writing in Middle English, which is, to all intents and purposes, a different language to modern English, and one which is largely incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't studied it. He was also, like all educated Englishmen of his day, trilingual in English, French and Latin (French was still the language of the English court in Chaucer's day), and the "Canterbury Tales" uses all three.
The overwhelming majority of readers would need a modern translation (and it is a translation, not merely spelling changes) to understand Chaucer.
English changed radically, for reasons that are still poorly understood, in the 200 years between Chaucer and Shakespeare. Shakespeare is (Early) Modern English, and hence understandable, although obviously with a lot of archaic vocabulary.