Why Can’t We Understand Chaucer’s English?

“Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote…”

If you’ve ever encountered the opening lines of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, you probably had one of two reactions. The first is a vague sense of recognition—these are English words, sort of. The second is a profound sense of confusion. Why does a text written in our own language, just 600 years ago, feel so utterly alien?

Many people chalk it up to a “funny accent” or simply “old-timey spelling.” The truth is far more complex and fascinating. The English of Chaucer’s time, known as Middle English, is separated from our Modern English by a series of dramatic linguistic shifts. It’s not just that the words are pronounced differently; the very nuts and bolts of the language—its vocabulary, its sentence structure, and its grammar—were fundamentally different.

Let’s take a journey back in time and uncover the real reasons why we can’t just pick up Chaucer and read it like a modern novel.

The Elephant in the Room: The Great Vowel Shift

It’s impossible to talk about the sound of Middle English without mentioning the Great Vowel Shift (GVS). This was a massive, chain-reaction change in the pronunciation of long vowels that occurred in English between the 1400s and 1700s, conveniently starting right after Chaucer’s death. In essence, English vowels moved up in the mouth.

Think of it like a game of musical chairs for sounds. The vowel in a word like Middle English goos (pronounced like “gohs”) moved up to become our modern goose. The vowel in fife (pronounced “feef”) shifted to become our modern five. The most famous example is the word for a building:

• Chaucer’s hous was pronounced roughly like “hooss”.
• The GVS shifted that vowel, eventually giving us our modern house (rhyming with “mouse”).

This explains why Chaucer’s rhymes can seem bizarre to us. In his day, soote (“sweet”) and roote (“root”) rhymed perfectly, both with a long ‘oh’ sound. The GVS is a huge piece of the puzzle, explaining why written Middle English often sounds so different when read aloud. But it doesn’t explain why the sentences themselves are so hard to untangle.

The Graveyard of Words: Lost Vocabulary

Languages are like living organisms; they are constantly shedding old cells and growing new ones. Middle English is littered with words that have simply fallen out of use. When reading Chaucer, you’re navigating a minefield of forgotten vocabulary.

Here are just a few examples of common Chaucerian words that are now obsolete:

• Eke: meaning “also” or “in addition”. (“A Knyght ther was, and that a worthy man / That fro the tyme that he first bigan / To riden out, he loved chivalrie, / Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie. / Ful worthy was he in his lordes werre, / And therto hadde he riden, no man ferre, / As wel in cristendom as in hethenesse, / And evere honoured for his worthynesse”.) – Whoops, that’s a long one. Let’s stick to simple words. A better example: “She was fair, and eke she was wise”.
• Yclept: meaning “called” or “named”. (From the Old English past participle prefix ge-, which became y-).
• Swinken: meaning “to toil” or “to labor”. A very common Old and Middle English word that was eventually replaced by its French counterparts.
• Nis: A handy contraction for “is not” (from ne is). We do the same thing with “isn’t”, but the form has changed completely.
• Wight: meaning “person”, “creature”, or “being”.

These aren’t just obscure terms; they were everyday words. Encountering them is like trying to read a modern text where every tenth word has been replaced with something from a dead language. Your brain stumbles, trying to find a foothold of meaning.

Putting the Words in a Different Order: Unfamiliar Syntax

This is perhaps the most significant hurdle for modern readers. We often take our sentence structure for granted. Modern English relies heavily on a fairly rigid Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word order to make sense. We know that “The dog bit the man” means something very different from “The man bit the dog”.

Middle English was far more flexible. Its Germanic roots were still showing, and it retained a word order that feels more like modern German at times. Verbs could appear at the end of clauses, objects could come before subjects, and whole phrases could be structured in ways that feel backward to us.

Consider this simple example:

Middle English: Hym was wo.
Literal Translation: To him was woe.
Modern Meaning: He was sad.

In Chaucer’s English, the person experiencing the emotion is the indirect object (“hym”). In our English, they are the subject (“He”).

Look again at the opening of The Canterbury Tales. The main clause—the core of the sentence—doesn’t even start until line 9! The first eight lines are a long subordinate clause setting the scene: “When April’s sweet showers have pierced March’s drought… and small birds are making melody… then people long to go on pilgrimages”. A modern writer would likely break that into several sentences or at least put the main idea closer to the beginning.

The Ghost of Grammar Past: Unfamiliar Endings

If you’ve ever studied a language like Latin, German, or Russian, you know about grammatical endings, or “inflections”. These are little bits added to the ends of words to show their function in a sentence (e.g., whether a noun is a subject or object, or how a verb conjugates).

Old English was a heavily inflected language. Middle English was in the process of shedding most of these endings, but many still remained, and they are utterly foreign to modern readers.

Verb Endings

In Modern English, we add an “-s” to third-person singular verbs in the present tense (he walks). Chaucer’s English used “-eth” or “-th”.

• hath = has
• gooth = goes
• perced = pierceth (pierces)

The infinitive form of verbs (like “to walk”) often ended in “-en” (e.g., to tellen, to riden).

Plural Nouns

While the “-s” or “-es” plural was becoming dominant, an older Germanic plural ending, “-en”, was still common for some words.

• eyen = eyes
• shoon = shoes
• hosen = hose/stockings

The Mysterious “y-” Prefix

You sometimes see a “y-” tacked onto the beginning of past participles, like yclept (called) or yronne (run). This is a fossilized remnant of the Old English prefix ge-, which was used to mark the past participle. It served a grammatical purpose that no longer exists in our language.

Time Travelers in Our Own Language

When you combine the Great Vowel Shift’s sound changes, a vocabulary full of forgotten words, a flexible syntax that puts words in unexpected places, and a host of ghostly grammatical endings, you have a perfect storm of linguistic confusion.

Chaucer’s English isn’t a different language, but it represents a profoundly different stage of its evolution. Reading it isn’t like reading Shakespeare, which is merely archaic; it’s like visiting a distant ancestor of the language we speak today. While it requires a glossary and a bit of patience, understanding why it’s so difficult is the first step toward unlocking its treasures. It’s a rewarding journey that reveals just how much our language has transformed in a relatively short span of time.