When rhymes go bad: Recontextualizing Chaucer's rhymes with the mid front long vowels

Abstract

ABSTRACTModern scholars generally agree that in Geoffrey Chaucer's sound system, [e:] and [ε] were both full phonemes, a situation paralleled with the back vowels [o:] and [ɔ:]. Unfortunately, Chaucer's verse fairly frequently rhymes words that should have /e:/ (according to diachronic criteria) with words in which one expects /ε:/. The prevailing explanation for their occurrence insists that Chaucer created the faulty rhymes neither through ignorance nor poetic license; instead, he liberally employed common variant pronunciations from fourteenth-century London English. This paper argues that the study of rhymes has been heavily determined by a belief that this literary artifice, studied in a context informed by the knowledge of historical phonology, may permit us to recover facts of Chaucer's pronunciation that otherwise would be irretrievable. The connections between this presupposition and Derrida's critique of the spoken versus the written are revealed, suggesting that rhymes possess their own unique written properties. In a three-stage analysis, scholarly attention is redirected toward rhymes as a graphological phenomenon.