Once upon a time, I labored for hours, in the dankest corners of my semi-elite college's library, teaching myself a cursory knowledge of Middle English. Yes, by the end, I sounded like the Swedish Chef, and, yeah, I've forgotten most of what I once clamored to know. And, sure, I am not the foremost medieval scholar in the country, nor do I pretend to be. But I still get a jolly good kick out of throwing out a guttural yogh on occasion. Just for giggles.
This week's episode of Sleepy Hollow pissed on everything I know to be true about Middle English.
Don't get me wrong. I am certainly not looking for historical truth in this series (I mean, we did all see last week's treatment of the Boston Tea Party, RIGHT?). But to my inner medievalist, these sins were egregious.
In rewatching the episode with my hubby, I managed to actually HEAR most of what was being thrown around as "Middle English" or "the language of Chaucer" or whatever Icky purported it to be. First off, they don't pronounce the "yogh" (you hear this omission best when they say the word "night" and it sounds, well, like the word "night") and the grammar structure was Germanic, not Middle English. They opted not to pluralize verbs correctly at all and favored the "ich" which, in the Middle Ages, was an early northern dialect at best and certainly not the aforementioned language of Chaucer, a late medieval poet who favored heavily the I (or, you know, y because spelling was fluid) with the pre-vowel shift pronunciation. Surely Crane would have studied that at Oxford. So, really, whatever it is they're doing is much closer to German than to Middle English.
It's also still bothering me that the writers are choosing willfully, despite giving us helpful dates, to ignore that Roanoke was concurrent with Elizabethan or Early Modern English, which, for all intents and purposes, might as well be called Shakespeare's English. Not Chaucer's. And definitely not Beowulf's. So the fact they are speaking any weird pidgin Middle-English-Germanic hybrid at all is still a big fucking mystery.
Thankfully, now that the television is set to the appropriate volume and my bilateral ear infection is on the mend, I can hear it so I can be appropriately outraged.
