Chaucer's Fourteenth-Century Story The Canterbury Tales may be considered almost impossible to read for many modern readers. They tend to have difficulty understanding many words and their meaning within this story. As I read The Canterbury Tales I noticed how the rhythm and rhyme differ from modern English, the vowels are pronounced differently, and many of the words used in this story are no longer used in modern English. Furthermore there are three main changes that can be seen over time in the English language, vocabulary, pronunciation and sentence structure. The many historical linguistic changes that have occurred since the 14th century can be found within the Canterbury Tales and explain why so many people struggle to fully understand the original version of this story. It's very clear when you sit down and start reading Chaucer's tale. work that constructed his sentences extremely differently from how we construct ours today. For example, the first four lines of the Canterbury Tales read: "When that April with its rains raised its sweet showers, the drought of March pierced the root and bathed every vein in such root liquor/liquid whereof the virtue has brought forth is the flower; when Zephyr eke with his sweet. the breath of the west wind has inspired also in every wood and field the tender crops and the young Sun his half in Aries. course y-run,3 in Aries / ranAnd small. The birds make melody, little birds that sleep all night with their eyes open that sleep (so goads nature in their courage), spurs / spirits so stretch people to go on pilgrimage, long people and palms to look for strange threads” (Chaucer lines 1-13) Which… half of the paper… is within Shakespeare's work. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are truly a perfect example of how much the English language has changed. I immediately noticed differences in rhythm, rhyme, sentence structure, vocabulary, and pronunciation, which directly reflect historical changes over the past five or six hundred years. These changes are what now cause many people to have difficulty understanding Middle English text quickly. It's also why many people find Chancer's work impossible to read, much less understand. Works Cited Chaucer, Geoffrey. GENERAL PROLOGUE. The Canterbury Tales."History of the English language." English club. .Mahoney, Nicole. “Language change.” Language and linguistics: language change. National Science Foundation, .