jaeleslie

So I was reading this Chaucer stuff yesterday (as long as I was looking up the spelling of the "smale fowles") from the invaluable Norton anthology. (And why INvaluable to make it more so, I wonder?) Noticed I had been working my way through the Wife of Bath the last time I visited, so I read some more of it, pretty sensational story if you can follow it, only to find she was just in the Prologue! and her actual Tale is something else completely, a knightly tale of romantic olden tymes apparently, which I have never quite gotten so far as... Garrulous lady aint she. Allas allas that ever love was sinne.

But what really struck me was how the spelling was so phonetic (at least in the Norton) that it was all too much like reading some young person's web journal or chat. And then I realized the reason it was coming so easily was that I have just finished reading Iain M. Banks Feersum Endjinn which is of course highly phonetic dialect in about a fifth of it, the portion from the point of view of some young person's diary. And strangely chaucerian. Or maybe that is just me.