Chaucer and Shakespeare's contributions to the English language...
Shakespeare may have dramatized some historical events and made all the world a stage, but Chaucer united two disparate and semi-hostile strands of the English language, thereby laying the linguistic foundations of a united kingdom...
From the Introduction to the Canterbury Tales: "[Geoffrey] Chaucer found two branches of the language; that spoken by the people, Tectonic in it's genius and its forms; that spoken by the learned and the noble, based on the French. Yet each branch had begun to borrow of the other - just as nobles and people had been taught to recognise that each need the other in the wars and the social tasks of the time; and Chaucer, a scholar, a courtier, a man conversant with all orders of society, but accustomed to speak, think, and write in the words of the highest, by his comprehensive genius cast into the simmering mould a magical amalgamant which made the two half-hostile elements united and interpenetrate each other.
Before Chaucer wrote, there were two tongues in England, keeping alive the feuds and resentments of cruel centuries; when he laid down his pen, there was practically but one speech - there was, and ever since has been, but one people."
Perhaps the reason Shakespeare is widely read and celebrated, while Chaucer is largely ignored or forgotten, is because Shakespearean English can be recited with relative ease, and Chaucer's Middle English a lot less so! The only person I know who could recite Chaucer with an authentic Middle English accent was our high school English teacher, Peter Lugg, and the class had difficulty following him for more than a couple of sentences without cracking up... ;-)
Here's an example of how the English language has transformed over the past 1,200 years, courtesy of a Facebook post by a high school classmate...
Imon Ghosh is a senior management professional with experience in both the corporate sector and academia, including as Head of Training for a Fortune 100 MNC in India, and as Director of the Academy of HRD. He is the founder of the Inclusive Growth & Financial Stability Forum and the Sustainable Economy Association, and has been an NHRDN National Professor.
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Imon is a life member of the All India Management Association, National HRD Network and the Indian Society for Training & Development, as well as the Indian Economic Association, Indian Econometrics Society and the Indian Society of Labour Economics.
Author of books on Inflation, Reducing Poverty to Accelerate Economic Growth, and Making Democracy More Democratic with Tax Innovations, as well as numerous articles, Imon also contributed a chapter on India's Sustainable Economic Growth: Challenges & Prospects that was published in the United Service Institution of India's Strategic Yearbook 2017. (The USI is Asia's oldest think tank, founded in 1870.)
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