One of my favourite things about Early Middle English is its complete lack of a written standard. The creativity and language development made possible because of said lack of standardization allows for expressive writing that very easily allows the reader to identify the geographic origin and social class of the writer or speaker (provided that the reader is as familiar with the dialects of Middle English as the contemporary American reader may be with those of American English). As someone who is nowhere near fluent in Middle English, this lack of a standard does make it difficult to read, but I’m in love with it in theory. It reminds me somewhat of the orthographic variety that can be seen now in different registers of English as it is written online.
It’s difficult to discuss Middle English without mentioning Geoffrey Chaucer. In fact, it’s nigh impossible to be a formally-educated scholar of the English language without having encountered some Chaucer. Be it in high school or undergrad, The Canterbury Tales is a staple of British Literature. Chaucer has been celebrated for his ability to document the different dialects and registers of speech in England during the Middle Ages. For example, lower-class characters like the Miller are more likely to use the Germanic (Old English and Old Norse) vocabulary that is eschewed by upper-class characters like the Knight, who’s more liable to use words of French or Latin stock (Horbin, 2017). For examples of the contrast between Germanic and Romantic vocabulary, we can conider word pairs like aware and cognizant (connaissance), begin and commence (commencer), child and infant (enfant)… the list goes on. It is because of this mastery of language, not only in form but in cultural context, that Chaucer is considered one of the literary greats. For this post, I would like to consider the language used by an author of high esteem as it parallels the language of a people held to this day in low esteem: African American English.
It has been well-established that African American English (also called Black English, among others) is one of the least prestigious varieties of English spoken today, largely due to a belief that it is “inferior” to *Standard English. This ideology of inferiority is driven by the idea that African American English is “broken English” rather than a wholly fleshed-out dialect of its own that is capable of more eloquently expressing some phenomena than *Standard English is. It is for the express purpose of disproving this belief that I’ll be comparing Chaucer’s English to Black English. In this post, I’ll exemplify three features shared by both Englishes in order to illustrate that the “problem” is not with the language—it is with those who speak it.
I found in my search through the Canterbury Tales two phonological features that differ from *Standard Modern English. First, the currently socially salient [æks] for [æsk] is everywhere. This isn’t a one-off, either: The Knight’s Tale (1739), The Miller’s Tale (3413), and the Merchant’s Tale (1480) all contain this version of “ask” (though the [sk] variant is also found throughout the poem). Below is an example from the Miller’s tale, emphasis my own.
And to hire housbonde bad hire for to seye,
If that he axed after Nicholas,
She sholde seye she nyste where he was
Geoffrey Chaucer,
The Miller’s Prologue, 3412-3414
“Let me [æks] you something” is liable to elicit judgmental looks or a lecture on “proper English” by many laypersons. A quick search online provided me with this page, which asserts that “[t]he dialectical pronunciation of “ask” as “ax” suggests to most people that the speaker has a substandard education. You should avoid it in formal speaking situations” (Bee Dictionary). In reality, the use of [æks] rather than [æsk] is simply the result of a common phonological process called metathesis, in which two letters are transposed. From the Old English æsce came the Middle English axe and eventually the Modern English “ask” (Oxford English Dictionary). Metathesis is a well-documented and common linguistic processes that occurs in a number of languages other than English. Other examples from English for those who wish to irritate a prescriptivist who insists on the supposed inferiority of [æks] include the words “prescription,” commonly pronounced [pərskrɪpʃən]; “asterisk,” commonly pronounced [æstərɪks]; and “comfortable,” which I can only ever remember hearing as [kʌmftərbəl], not [kʌmfərtəbəl]. All of these words have common, socially-acceptable pronunciations that deviate from their orthography due to metathesis.
And therwithal they skriked and they howped.
It semed as that hevene sholde falle.
Geoffrey Chaucer,
The Nun’s Priest’s Prologue, 3400-3401
Metathesis-driven variants are even encoded in English orthography, with words like “bird,” which was commonly spelled as “brid” or “bridd” in Old and Middle English; “third,” originally “þridda” in Old English; and “bright (of light),” represented variably as “byrht,” “beorht” in Old and Middle English (OED Online). This variation documented in our non-standardized written language is exemplary of the evolution of “ask,” as well.
Above: depiction of Geoffrey Chaucer, from the Ellesmere manuscript of The Canterbury Tales. Image source.
“Skriken,” according to the University of Michigan’s Middle English Compendium, is the Middle English verb for “to shriek.” The Compendium actually gives alternative pronunciations including both the cluster [ʃɹ] and [skɹ] in an illustration of the previously-mentioned diversity in our non-standardized Middle English phonology and orthography.
The last feature I’d like to discuss is a syntactic one rather than a phonological one: negative concord. That is to say, double negatives. I won’t say we’ve all heard it as children, but growing up in the South, I’d say that I was frequently told not to use more than one negative in a sentence (the justifaction being that they’d cancel one another out, as if language is arithmetic).
Still from “Double Negatives (English Grammar),” Image source.
However, many, many languages use negative concort in order to express negation. I first encountered it in French, with the standard negation of ne … pas (often cut down to simply pas in casual speech), but it’s present in other languages, like Yiddish and Greek. Oh, and Old and Middle English.
The day is short, and it is passed prime,
And yet ne wan I nothyng in this day.
Geoffrey Chaucer
The Friar’s Tale, 1476-1477
Once again, Chaucer breaks rules that have been drilled into our collective consciousness since childhood and produces language that, if spoken today, would be stigmatized primarily due to its association with African American English.
Now, a brief pause to give an explanation for my fellow English-speakers who can’t immediately parse the Old English and would like to know more. I found that the first line is pretty self-explanatory, but the second line requires a closer look. “Ne wan I nothyng” is the least transparent part of this pair of lines. According to the University of Michigan’s Middle English Compendium, “ne” is essentially the ModE “nor,” and, while there is no such definition for “wan” specifically, I propose that it is an alternate spelling or form of “wynne,” (ModE “gain” or “win”) which is used in the same construction later on in the poem: “Heere wynne I nothyng upon cariage” (1570). This use on line 1570 is given a similar gloss of “I gain/ed nothing” in Harvard’s interlinear gloss.¹ So, our second line roughly translates to “And yet I gained nothing in this day” (the translation that Harvard gives). So we see that the original Middle English preserved two negatives within the same clause, something that’s unthinkable to many ModE-speaking prescriptivists. Perhaps a more accurate translation would be “And yet I didn’t gain nothing in this day,” an interpretation that I’m sure would have prescriptivists clutching their pearls).
Those who have been lectured for your English, I feel for you. I’m by no means the speaker of a dialect so socially salient as African American English, but I was chided regularly for my “ain’t”s and my “brung”s, no matter how many times I showed my teacher that “ain’t” was, in fact, in the school’s dictionary. It feels terrible to not be taken seriously as a child and especially as an adult based solely on nonstandard dialect features. It is my hope that this post gives somebody the confidence to shut down the next person who tries to correct their language, insist that English is “deteriorating,” or propogate whatever other prescriptivist language myth they like the best.
If Chaucer can use “axe” and be considered the father of English literature, then let’s face facts: your issue with those who say it now has nothing to do with the propriety of the language and everything to do with your disdain for Black English and the Black Americans who speak it.
Endnotes
¹Yes, I know the gloss is not the same as reading the poem in its original language, and I’m always a huge proponent of reading literature in its original language. However, I’m not fluent in Middle English so much of what I’m doing is with a dictionary and guesswork, and the fact that an academic at Harvard translates “wan” and “wynne” as the same ModE verb gives a bit more weight to my argument, I think.
Works Cited
Ask, v. (2020). In Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford University Press. Web.
Ax or Ask. (2018). In Bee Dictionary. Web.
Bird, n. (2020). In Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford University Press. Web.
Bright, adj. and n. (2020). In Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford University Press. Web.
Chaucer, G. (1387-1400). The Canterbury Tales. (L. D. Benson, Trans.). Harvard University. Web.
Horobin, S. (2017). Reference: Chaucer’s Middle English In C. Barrington et al (Ed.), The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University.
Luu, C. (2020, Feb. 12). Black English Matters. JSTOR Daily. Web.
Middle English Compendium. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 2018. Web.
Morgan, M. (2002). Language, Discourse and Power in African American Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Third, adj. (and adv.) and n. In Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford University Press. Web.
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