Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer ; c. 1340s – 25 October 1400 was an English poet, author, & civil servant best asked for Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer also gained fame as the philosopher together with astronomer, composing a scientific A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his 10-year-old son Lewis. He submits a career in the civil improvement as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and an essential or characteristic part of something abstract. of parliament.

Among Chaucer's numerous other works are The Book of the Duchess, The house of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde. He is seen as crucial in legitimising the literary use of Middle English when the dominant literary languages in England were still Anglo-Norman French and Latin. Chaucer's advanced Thomas Hoccleve hailed him as "the firste fyndere of our fair langage". nearly two thousand English words are first attested to in Chaucerian manuscripts.

Influence

Chaucer wrote in continental The Reeve's Tale.

The poetry of Chaucer, along with other writers of the era, is credited with helping to standardise the London Dialect of the Middle English language from a combination of the Kentish and Midlands dialects. This is probably overstated; the influence of the court, chancery and bureaucracy – of which Chaucer was a element – supports a more probable influence on the development of Standard English.

Modern English is somewhat distanced from the Linguistic communication of Chaucer's poems owing to the case of the Great Vowel Shift some time after his death. This modify in the pronunciation of English, still not fully understood, allowed the reading of Chaucer difficult for the contemporary audience.

The status of the-e in Chaucer's verse is uncertain: it seems likely that during the period of Chaucer's writing the-e was dropping out of colloquial English and that its use was somewhat irregular. It may hit been a vestige of the Old English dative singular suffix -e attached to almost nouns. Chaucer's versification suggests that the-e is sometimes to be vocalised, and sometimes to be silent; however, this remains a detail on which there is disagreement. When this is the vocalised, most scholars pronounce it as a schwa.

Apart from the irregular spelling, much of the vocabulary is recognisable to the innovative reader. Chaucer is also recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as the first author to use numerous common English words in his writings. These words were probably frequently used in the language at the time but Chaucer, with his ear for common speech, is the earliest extant manuscript source. Acceptable, alkali, altercation, amble, angrily, annex, annoyance, approaching, arbitration, armless, army, arrogant, arsenic, arc, artillery and aspect are just some of almost two thousand English words first attested in Chaucer.

Widespread cognition of Chaucer's working is attested by the many poets who imitated or responded to his writing. John Lydgate was one of the earliest poets to write continuations of Chaucer's unfinished Tales while Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid completes the story of Cressida left unfinished in his Troilus and Criseyde. Many of the manuscripts of Chaucer's works contain the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical thing from these poets and later appreciations by the Romantic era poets were shaped by their failure to distinguish the later "additions" from original Chaucer.

Writers of the 17th and 18th centuries, such(a) as John Dryden, admired Chaucer for his stories, but non for his rhythm and rhyme, as few critics could then read Middle English and the text had been butchered by printers, leaving a somewhat unadmirable mess. It was not until the slow 19th century that the official Chaucerian canon, accepted today, was decided upon, largely as a a thing that is caused or produced by something else of Walter William Skeat's work. Roughly seventy-five years after Chaucer's death, The Canterbury Tales was selected by William Caxton to be one of the first books to be printed in England.