Editing Geoffrey Chaucer (section)

===Linguistic===
[[File:Chaucer Hoccleve.png|thumb|upright=0.9|Portrait of Chaucer from a 1412 manuscript by [[Thomas Hoccleve]], who may have met Chaucer]]
Chaucer wrote in continental [[Accentual-syllabic verse|accentual-syllabic metre]], a style which had developed in English literature since around the 12th century as an alternative to the [[Alliterative verse|alliterative]] Anglo-Saxon [[Metre (poetry)|metre]].<ref>C. B. McCully and J. J. Anderson, ''English Historical Metrics'', Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 97.</ref> Chaucer is known for metrical innovation, inventing the [[rhyme royal]], and he was one of the first English poets to use the five-stress line, a decasyllabic cousin to the [[iambic pentametre]], in his work, with only a few anonymous short works using it before him.<ref>[[Marchette Chute]], ''Geoffrey Chaucer of England'' E. P. Dutton, 1946, p. 89.</ref> The arrangement of these five-stress lines into rhyming [[couplet]]s, first seen in his ''The Legend of Good Women'', was used in much of his later work and became one of the standard poetic forms in English. His early influence as a [[satirist]] is also important, with the common humorous device, the funny accent of a regional [[dialect]], appearing in ''[[The Reeve's Tale]]''.<ref name="Taylor">{{cite journal |last1=Taylor |first1=Joseph |title=Chaucer's Uncanny Regionalism: Rereading the North in The Reeve's Tale |journal=The Journal of English and Germanic Philology |date=October 2010 |volume=109 |issue=4 |publisher=University of Illinois Press |pages=468–489 |doi=10.5406/jenglgermphil.109.4.0468 |jstor=10.5406/jenglgermphil.109.4.0468 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jenglgermphil.109.4.0468}}</ref> Regarded by historians as the first use of dialect for comedy in English literature, [[J. R. R. Tolkien]] also claimed it as "dramatic realism".<ref name="Taylor"/>

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.<ref>Edwin Winfield Bowen, ''Questions at Issue in our English Speech'', NY: Broadway Publishing, 1909, p. 147.</ref> This is probably overstated; the influence of the court, [[Lord Chancellor|chancery]] and bureaucracy – of which Chaucer was a part – remains a more probable influence on the development of [[Standard English]].

[[Modern English]] is somewhat distanced from the language of Chaucer's poems owing to the effect of the [[Great Vowel Shift]] sometime after his death.<ref>{{citation |last=Wells |first=John C. |author-link=John C. Wells |title=Accents of English: Volume 1 |location=[[Cambridge]] |publisher=[[Cambridge University Press]] |year=1982 |isbn=0-521-22919-7 |pages=184–8}}.</ref> This change in the [[pronunciation]] of English, still not fully understood, makes the reading of Chaucer difficult for the modern audience.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Devani |first1=Singh |title=Chaucer's Early Modern Readers: Reception in Print and Manuscript |date=2023 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |pages=44–83 |chapter=Chapter 1 - Glossing, Correcting, and Emending |doi=10.1017/9781009231121.002 |isbn=978-1-009-23112-1 |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/chaucers-early-modern-readers/glossing-correcting-and-emending/A29949485E40A781239EC8964B204F7B}}</ref>

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

Besides the irregular spelling, much of the vocabulary is recognisable to the modern reader. Chaucer is also recorded in the ''[[Oxford English Dictionary]]'' as the first author to use many common English words in his writings. These words were probably frequently used in the language at the time, but Chaucer was the earliest extant manuscript source with his ear for common speech. ''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.<ref name="Cannon">Cannon, Christopher (1998). ''The making of Chaucer's English: a study of words'', Cambridge University Press. p. 129. {{ISBN|0-521-59274-7}}.</ref>