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Chaucer's tell-tale lexicon: romancing seinte cecyle - Geoffrey Chaucer
Style, Fall, 1997 by Judith A. Weise
Most scholars agree that Chaucer's increasing use of Romance vocabulary can roughly date his works relative to each other and - based on the few works with generally accepted dates - help establish a chronology of his literary production. This procedure can also date extended parts of Chaucerian texts through analyses of the percentages of Romance vocabulary usage in each. Drawing on modern statistical methods and insights from Chaucerian poetics and other fields, lexical analyses in this study will reveal the complex history of the composition of the Second Nun's Prologue and Tale.
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Joseph Mersand undertook lexical analysis of the entire Chaucerian canon in his 1939 study, Chaucer's Romance Vocabulary. His purpose was "to investigate Chaucer's Romance words, not only to provide definite, reliable quantitative estimates, but also to demonstrate the value of such statistics for the solution of problems of interpretation, chronology, and textual accuracy" (2). For each of Chaucer's works, Mersand calculated the "(1) number of Romance words per line in usage; (2) number of Romance words; (3) percentage of Romance words in vocabulary; (4) percentage of Romance words in the text; (5) number of Romance words used per line; and (6) percentage of Romance words that rime" (98n27).(1) The category of interest to this article is the fourth: the percentage of Romance words used in the text.
Mersand came to ten conclusions, two of which are central to this study: his first, that "Chaucer added new Romance words to his vocabulary as he advanced in his literary career" (137), and his sixth, that the "proportions of Romance words show wide variations in the separate works. The variation may be employed to verify the accepted chronology of his works and to suggest a few changes" (137). Mersand's thesis has been challenged by David Burnley and Norman Davis, but the two conclusions affecting this essay have been strongly corroborated elsewhere.
Both Burnley and Davis contend that Mersand's analysis ignores the important difference between established French loan words and those introduced by Chaucer. Burnley argues that "Statistical statements to the effect that Chaucer's vocabulary contains 51.8 per cent of Romance loan words [static total, not usage] are of little use in assessing the impact of Chaucerian style, and indeed simply ignore the crucial factor of the contemporary perception of the status of the words" (135). In fact, Mersand had no intention of assessing Chaucerian style. His much narrower goal was the calculation and analysis of the number and percentage of Romance words and usage in ten categories in each of Chaucer's works, and the chronology of the works these data reveal.
Burnley discusses the social implications in fourteenth-century England of adopting French words, which, he states, "was associated with social elevation," as "French words and phrases were thought to give elegance to English expression" (134). He goes on to point out, however, that since French loan words were common in romances generations before Chaucer,
a simple etymological distinction between the words of French and English origin would be a misrepresentation of the way in which Chaucer's compatriots would perceive their language. At the least, we must distinguish between established French borrowings, which have become incorporated into the common core of the language, and those which are new and are still felt as foreign. (135)
Burnley's reasoning here is, of course, correct, although he ignores Mersand's discussions of established borrowings and Anglo-French on pages 14-20, 30-31, and 40-41. Nevertheless, Burnley's objections do not affect the validity of Mersand's data, the total percentages of Romance usage, variously calculated, nor his conclusions about the relative chronology of Chaucer's works based on the increase in his Romance usage.
Davis also objects to Mersand's method. To Mersand's statement that "The only way to determine the nature of Chaucer's vocabulary is to count every word he used, to investigate the etymology of every word, and, finally, to arrange, add and compute carefully" (37), Davis responds,
These last activities should not come "finally" at all. The significance of Romance words varies infinitely. We need to know not only the bare fact of etymology but the associations and status of every word, and whether specific applications of it would seem to contemporary hearers in any way out of the ordinary. (71)
In his emphasis on Mersand's "finally," Davis tries to distract the reader from his earlier pronouncement about the importance of investigating the etymology of every word - exactly what he has done throughout his essay. It is no doubt true that Davis, with the resources of The Middle English Dictionary now available, has far more etymological information than Mersand had in the 1930s, but this bounty does not weaken Mersand's method.
As Davis points out, the data in The Middle English Dictionary do supersede those in the first edition of The Oxford English Dictionary (which Mersand had at his disposal), and this limitation should not be overlooked. Yet this new information does not influence Mersand's two conclusions with which this article is concerned: the increase in Chaucer's Romance vocabulary and the use of these increasing percentages to date his works. Facts not available in 1939 have certainly altered some of the accepted dates of composition, yet, in general, most of the dates suggested by earlier scholars with which Mersand agrees, such as the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women and The Parlement of Foules, have since been corroborated by other evidence.
