Since Middle English prose, especially later Middle English, is (aside from a few syntactic oddities and obsolete vocabulary) fairly transparent to the modern reader, most books on Middle English I have seen tend to be concerned mostly with helping people read texts with a lot of dialectal or lexical errata. I have not found much on being able to speak Middle English, probably because it's an exercise in pointlessness. There are a few guides to pronounciation on the Net, but little on grammar or lexicon, and no pronunciation dictionary (it's difficult to determine from spelling alone what the Middle English etymon would have been, especially with words like <meat> or <bread>; I can backpedal the Great Vowel Shift, but that probably won't always work). Does anybody have any suggestions?
(Before everyone points it out, I know Middle English is a disunified mass of registers with lots of variation by region and time. I'm thinking a later-stage literary standard like the language of the Canterbury Tales.)
(Before everyone points it out, I know Middle English is a disunified mass of registers with lots of variation by region and time. I'm thinking a later-stage literary standard like the language of the Canterbury Tales.)
I know the library at my college has a book on either Middle or Old English. I'll check, and if it's what you're after, I'll let you know what it is. You ought to be able to find it online. Though I won't be at college again until Tuesday.
Here's my favorite
