[katana]

Figured it was something along those lines. Undoubtedly old Germanic (Angle and Saxon) in origin, when spoken with a sort of Scots burr it was quite a lovely sounding language.

[Charles H. (The_r0nin)]

He's wrong. That's Middle English. Old English (Anglo-Saxon) is a linguistic descendant of Old High German, and included the thorn (Þ), the edh (ð) and the ash (æ) characters. It is the language of the epic Beowulf and is strongly cased (meaning that case endings, rather than word order, determined the function of words within a sentence). For example, a dialect of Old English would have represented the sentence of "The boy killed the dragon" as Þe cnapa sloh ðe dracan. In Modern English, if you reverse the word order, you get "The dragon killed the boy." But in Old English, Þe dracan sloh ðe cnapa still means "The boy killed the dragon," since the subject is demonstrated by the nominative case ending -a and the direct object by the case ending -an. To get "The dragon killed the boy" you would need Þe draca sloh ðe cnapan.

As you will note, the selection from Chaucer does NOT contain case endings (except for those that have survived into Modern English). After the Norman Invasion in 1066, the Anglo-Saxon language was subborned to the native French of William the Conqueror and his cohorts. For this reason, The old Germanic Anglo-Saxon language was supplanted by Middle English (a combination of some A-S words, some Latin words, and many French words). Rather than a Scottish burr, it should be spoke with a French elision and vowels that do not change in pronunciation (we're before the great vowel shift that gave us multiple sounds for each vowel). "A" is ah, like in bawl; e is eh, like in wet; i is ee, like in beat; and so on.

The proper pronunciation of the first line from Chaucer would have been like : Wh-ah-n th-ah-t Ah-preel weeth hees shoh-wehrs sh-oh-t, etc (with vowels separated in my transliteration, but not in actual speech).

So, in reality, the thorn character was used in Anglo-Saxon (Old English), but was gone from Chaucer's dialect of Middle English by the time he wrote (but it still existed in some northern dialects of Middle English... like that of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight... but that's a whole other discussion)...