Written English: The Making of the Language, 1370-1400
- Author / Editor
- Catto, Jeremy.
Written English: The Making of the Language, 1370-1400
- Published
- Past and Present 179 (2003): 24-59.
- Description
- Describes the rise of writing in English during the "age of Chaucer," commenting on the Ricardian poets (emphasizing Chaucer), Middle English sermon cycles, Lollard translation, and other examples of the "elevated vernacular" of late fourteenth-century English, distinguishing it from the Anglo-Saxon written standard, early Middle English, and Anglo-French. Attends to Anglo-French and neo-Latin loan words and Latin rhetorical influence, finding no evidence of "monoglot English readers" or writers until much later.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Language and Word Studies