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- Category: Publisher
- Published on Friday, 20 January 2012 10:19
- Written by Admin
- Hits: 23
Students: This site is mainly for you. Reading medieval literature, a staple of courses in college or senior high school, is made unnecessarily difficult by the unfamiliar spelling of the period.
This adds nothing of value to the literature, only difficulty: saw turns up as saugh, say, saigh; father's as fadres; grete is great but also greet, and hundreds of others. Very misleading.
Your Shakespeare text is not presented as it was printed in his day. The spelling and punctuation there are modernized. Here we do the same for Chaucer. Understanding his work still requires effort because we have not changed his words, only his spellings and punctuation. Those words are 600 years old, and some are obsolete and some have changed their meaning. Explanatory glosses in the margin of our written version explain the difficult words. In the Audiogloss version a spoken gloss replaces the written one.