More on Chaucer (ca. 1390) and Lollards (1400s) and the emergence of SE
We ran a bit short of time on 28 February, so I wanted to make a couple of quick points about comparing late ME/Early EMod (or EEMod?).
- 1. I hope no one thinks I’m trying to promote Wycliffite/Lollard religious ideas. We’re just interested in the language.
- B. Please hang on to the translations you produced in class, I had meant to ask to see them.
- Thirdly: I’m interested to know which you found more difficult to render into idiomatic PDE: Chaucer’s Parson or Hawisia Moone?
The “confession” had no glosses, did you find yourself needing any, and if so, for which words?
Crystal makes a point about literary language vs. the language of Wycliffite writings:
Poetic language is the domain where linguistic rules are maximally bent and broken. It is this distance between literary language and everyday which makes it unlikely that any literary writer, or group of writers, would ever exercise much influence on the emergence of a linguistic standard. The best such writers might do is reinforce trends that are already there (241-42).
This perhaps underscores my point that it is difficult to change the spelling of Chaucer and make it “look like” modern English, whereas a Lollard text only 40 years after Chaucer “looks like” modern English if you just update the spelling.
Wycliff and his followers, he points out, were interested in “developing a kind of English which ordinary people could understand–a style which would be close to everyday speech” (241). The Wycliffite Bible went through at least two versions, the second is noted as being the more “successful” in that it appears to have more English words that are common in the language today (thus indicating greater and wider influence). One of the things I find especially interesting about the emergence of a written standard is the idea that translation is a great impetus for stabilizing written discourse. Just as Jerome’s Vulgate translation of the Bible created a defacto written standard for medieval Latin, the translation of authoritative Latin works seems to push English into new territory, and to force translators to make compromises as they look to faithfully represent an original text. The Preface to the Wycliffite Bible (ca. 1380) puts it this way:
First is to knowe þat þe beste translating is, out of Latyn into English, to translate aftir þe sentence (sense), not only aftir þe wordis, so þat þe sentence be as opin eiþer (or) openere in English as in Latyn, and go nat fer fro þe lettre; and if þe lettre mai not be suid in þe translating, let þe sentence be hool and open, for þe wordis owen to serue to þe entent and the sentence, and ellis þe wordis be superflu eiþer false (Hudson, ed. 64).
A discussion of how to render a Latin ablative absolute in English follows. This is a kind of statement of translation theory: Follow the sense, not word for word. Let the English be “whole and open” but do not go too far “from the letter.” Above all, let the words serve the intent and sense, or else the words will be “superflu” or false. Superflu (superfluous) is especially interesting in this context, as most of the earliest attestations occur in the English writing of Wycliff and his followers. The word is almost ostentatious in its Latinity, but it was evidently a favorite of Wycliff’s and of Wycliffites, who were not averse to re-coding Latin words for English use. Superflu has a history in early medical writing as describing the swelling and superation of fistula, or boils. For the English to be “whole” (healthy) and “open” it must avoid the disease of slavish literalism.
K_eng wrote:
I definitely had an easier time translating the confessions text, simply because it was lacking in the more complex vocabulary and sentence structure found in a literary work like the Parson’s Tale. Because of this, I found myself needing more explanations for certain phrases in Chaucer. Yet even without the gloss, I could figure out the more ordinary language in the confession. I had trouble with only the word “indenturis”. Most words that I did not directly know could be figured out via the context of the sentence.
Posted 28 Feb 2008 at 4:32 pm ¶
meghan wrote:
I also thought that Chaucer was more difficult than the confession. This could have been due to the fact that we did it second and I slightly started to get the hang of it, but the literary, learned nature of the Chaucer story contained many words that I doubt were very common in conversation. The sentence structures within the Chaucer story was also more complex than the confession, showing again that literary language is at least at a level slightly above conversation. I think this is something inherent in writing, and although authors have experimented with portraying their writing at the level of conversation, the distance between writing and conversation can seldom be erased.
Posted 01 Mar 2008 at 10:30 am ¶
Stephanie wrote:
I too, have to say Chaucer was more difficult. Perhaps that’s because, as these two have said, Chaucer’s more poetic and elevated style doesn’t lend itself to a word-for-word reading, so we had to go by a looser sense of what he meant instead of going word by word. Within the Chaucer excerpt I had the hardest time (and I remember there being some confusion about this) with the quotation from Saint Paul, from which I had trouble deciphering even a general “sense” of meaning. There were a few too many subordinate clauses, and the punctuation didn’t help.
As I look at it now, the confession might also have been easier because there are so many triplets of synonyms and so on. There is a lot of “concealed, comforted, supported” and “kept, hold, and continued,” etc. It’s easier to figure out what’s going on when the language is in a conversational style but also bent on being very, very precise.
Posted 02 Mar 2008 at 1:35 pm ¶
meredith wrote:
I also had an easier time translating Hawisia Moone’s confession. In the Chaucer, especially in the quotation attributed to St Paul, the word order was confusing, so that I had trouble figuring out how the various clauses were related to each other. Translating the confession, I hesitated over whether or not to change the groups of synonyms into more colloquial PDE, which reminded me of Crystal’s point (if I remember correctly) about how legalistic language, even in PDE, tends towards linguistic conservatism and retains such groups of synonyms.
Posted 03 Mar 2008 at 11:08 pm ¶
Judith wrote:
Chaucer was much more difficult for me as well. The only word I really had trouble with in Hawisia Moone’s confession was “hoomly” I guess because I first associated it with “homely” which doesn’t make sense in the context. In Chaucer, the varying location of the modifiers (like the ambiguity over who is “weeping” and “of whiche the ende of deeth” which seems to have no obvious predicate) makes it much harder to derive the meaning. The Chaucer words themselves don’t seem to be that much more difficult than those of Hawisia Moone, but Chaucer’s freedom with style and word order produces more confusion. His focus is clearly on style over clarity.
Posted 05 Mar 2008 at 11:09 pm ¶
sean wrote:
RE: Judith’s comment:
‘The only word I really had trouble with in Hawisia Moone’s confession was “hoomly†I guess because I first associated it with “homely†which doesn’t make sense in the context.’
Hoomly here actually does mean something like “homely” as in “familiar” (but not as in “plain” referring to appearance).
Posted 06 Mar 2008 at 9:00 am ¶