The Geoffrey Chaucer Website Homepage

International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) Origin The IPA was first published in 1888 by the Association Phonétique Internationale (International Phonetic Association), a group of French language teachers founded by Paul Passy. The aim of the organisation was to devise a system for transcribing the sounds of speech which was independent of any particular language and applicable to all languages. A phonetic script for English created in 1847 by Isaac Pitman and Henry Ellis was used as a model for the IPA. Uses The IPA is used in dictionaries to indicate the pronunciation of words. Where symbols appear in pairs, the one on the right represents a voiced consonant, while the one on the left is unvoiced. Download an Excel spreadsheet containing the IPA How the sounds of English are represented by the IPA Recommended books about phonetics and phonology Links UCLA Phonetics Lab Data IPA, International Phonetic Association Free IPA fonts

The Criyng and the Soun: Chaucer Audio Files | Baragona's Literary Resources The Chaucer Metapage Audio Files These are links to web pages with excerpts from Chaucer’s works read by professors. The main purpose of these recordings is to help students improve their pronunciation of Chaucer’s Middle English. The emphasis is on accuracy of pronunciation, according to the most current scholarly thinking, though you will notice some individual variation among the readers. Compact Disks of complete texts of individual works by Chaucer can be purchased from The Chaucer Studio Web Site. These sound files are in MP3 format (or WAV format or both). From The Canterbury Tales From Troilus and Criseyde From the Dream Visions From The Legend of Good Women and the Short Poems The Legend of Good Women, Prologue, Text F, ll. 1-39 read by Alison Baker of California State Polytechnic University. Like this: Like Loading...

"Born Eunuchs" Home Page and Library The willingness to engage in homosexual activity (particularly intergenerationally) was widespread among men in the ancient Mediterranean region. Women and boys were considered equally tempting sex objects for ordinary men. Therefore, homosexual activity could not have provided a means of distinguishing a minority of men as "gay" the way we do in the modern world. However, the ancients did differentiate based on an unwillingness or incapacity for heterosexual sex. Certain men were known to fundamentally lack arousal for sex with women, and men of this kind were distinguished from the majority of ordinary men on that basis. The innately and exclusively homosexual men of the ancient world inhabited the category of eunuchs. What was called sodomy in the Judeo-Christian tradition, namely the sexual penetration of "males," was criminalized in many ancient cultures. email: aquarius@well.com visitors since 3/1/99 © 1999 Faris Malik.

The history of the English language - an introduction English is a member of the Indo-European family of languages. This broad family includes most of the European languages spoken today. The Indo-European family includes several major branches: Latin and the modern Romance languages (French etc.); the Germanic languages (English, German, Swedish etc.); the Indo-Iranian languages (Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit etc.); the Slavic languages (Russian, Polish, Czech etc.); the Baltic languages of Latvian and Lithuanian; the Celtic languages (Welsh, Irish Gaelic etc.); Greek. The influence of the original Indo-European language can be seen today, even though no written record of it exists. Of these branches of the Indo-European family, two are, as far as the study of the development of English is concerned, of paramount importance, the Germanic and the Romance (called that because the Romance languages derive from Latin, the language of ancient Rome). East Germanic was spoken by peoples who migrated back to southeastern Europe. Global English

Gay History and Literature Chaucer's Language Understanding Middle English If you have no experience at reading Middle English, the primary obstacle to appreciating the General Prologue is the language itself. Chaucer's English is over 600 years old, but it is still recognizably English, and with a little effort it can be understood. In fact, one of the great benefits of reading Chaucer is learning this older form of English, one that allows us insight into the minds and lives of the people who spoke it. At first the going is slow, and the language is full of words and phrasing that are at best unusual, at worst incomprehensible.