Middle English pronunciations of Britten's Ceremony of Carols

Last night I sang in a concert with the Ebor singers. The first half was mostly Benjamin Britten's well-loved Ceremony of Carols, and the second half was assorted seasonal pieces, interspersed with the Advent ("Big O") Antiphons (O sapientia et al.). It was all quite effective, and very enjoyable. My biggest contribution was working out the approximate Middle English pronunciations of the poems used in the Ceremony of Carols. Here is what I came up with. (The document is in three-column format, with the texts on the left, the glosses in the middle, and a phonetic pronunciation on the right.) Others are welcome to use it; please just drop me an e-mail to let me know if it was useful to you. I drew on my (sketchy) prior experience with Middle English, and also a Google search, which yielded several webpages of which the most concise and helpful was at pronunciationguide.org .

Updated April 3 2012 with a link to a google document version of the text. Use at will, and let me know how it works out for you.

Update Nov 11 2018: I've gotten some commenters asking for the document. The hyperlink was too subtle I guess. It's here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1P4E7RCSjc52ma87VtAczCNcmbYNaUGi1Wost5UYTye42A1x3GMVAwiuDV-si/view?usp=sharing 

All Souls' Day

Ad mortem festinamus
peccare desistamus
peccare desistamus.




Scribere proposui de contemptu mundano
ut degentes seculi non mulcentur in vano





iam est hora surgere
a sompno mortis pravo
a sompno mortis pravo.




Ad mortem festinamus
peccare desistamus
peccare desistamus.




Vita brevis breviter in brevi finietur
mors venit velociter quae neminem veretur





omnia mors perimit
et nulli miseretur
et nulli miseretur.





Ad mortem festinamus
peccare desistamus
peccare desistamus.







Ni conversus fueris et sicut puer factus
et vitam mutaveris in meliores actus








intrare non poteris
regnum Dei beatus
regnum Dei beatus.





Ad mortem festinamus
peccare desistamus
peccare desistamus.



Tuba cum sonuerit dies erit extrema
et iudex advenerit vocabit sempiterna






electos in patria
prescitos ad inferna
prescitos ad inferna.






Ad mortem festinamus
peccare desistamus
peccare desistamus.

teaching joy

So I'm teaching the university's Introduction to Astrophysics class, completely unhindered by any prior knowledge of astrophysics. (I've made up a nifty little webpage for the class, using Google's Page Creator which is sheer joy to use.) It's going well so far. I'm bribing students with chocolate (Mars and Milky Way bars, naturally) to answer questions, and they're proving to be quite responsive. (Also v. young. They're all eighteen, which means...I don't even want to think about what year they were born in.) Also keen. One of them came up to me after class today and said, "I was reading the textbook last night, and I was thinking about some stuff, and I was just wondering,..." --and I had to get him to repeat what he said next because my brain had shorted out. Students. Reading textbooks. Thinking about what they read. Asking teachers interesting questions (it turned out to be, what would happen to the orientation of the Earth if it were to stop spinning on its axis, given its current squashed shape and the pull of the Sun and the Moon?). ...I don't think I can handle this much pedagogical joy all at once.

why I love my parents, reason #329

Scene: driving in the outskirts of York, past a shop with a big sign that says "TYRES BATTERIES CLUTCHES"

me: Hey look! That shop sells ancient Mediterranean seaports.
Dad: And coastal gun emplacements.
Mom: It's a bit ambiguous, though, about whether it also sells evening purses or groups of eggs.
me: Either way, that's quite a diverse product line.

A very English day

The other day I walked from Kilnwick Percy to Bishop Wilton. Along the way I stopped to chat with several people out for countryside rambles with their dogs (being careful, of course, to address their dogs as I would their children--thank you, "Watching the English," for that heads-up) and also to cause consternation in the world of sheep by bleating back at them when they bleated at me. I paused in Bishop Wilton to have lunch at the (elegant) village pub--strong orange tea, and the standard, quintessentially English dish, to be found at all eating establishments no matter how small or remote; I refer of course to chicken curry. (I also laughed my fool head off at the print on the wall showing three gentlemen fishing in a punt, wearing top hats and sitting on straight-backed chairs.) By the time I got back home over the fields I was in a Lizzy Bennet condition--my petticoats three inches deep in mud. (For petticoat, read jeans; for mud, read cow shit.)
And then I came back to the retreat centre and attended a Wish-Fulfilling Jewel Puja.
--okay, maybe that last part wasn't so typically English.

little-known historical fact

During the later years of the Venetian city-state, it slid into corruption and decay. The city leaders became especially notorious for their greed, rapacity, and violence. It got to such a point, in fact, that some citizens put a sign up outside of town saying, "Beware of the Doge."

home dusty home

me: Hey, wow, is this a new vacuum cleaner?
smart-ass flatmate: Well, yes.
me: Does it actually work?
s.a.f.: Well, no.
me: Why not?
s.a.f.: It's buddhist.
me: huh?
s.a.f.: No attachments.

Mondegreen Thursday, hard rock edition

I want to rock and roll all night
and part of every day.
--Kiss

The walls start shakin'
The earth was quakin'
My mind was achin'
And we were bacon.
--AC/DC

designated French-speaker

So now that our native French collaborator has left, I'm the most fluent speaker of French left working on the experiment. I'm actually quite proud of how I've done so far. I've managed to get a batch of targets made, to book taxis and hotel rooms, and to have a quite lengthy and detailed conversation with the police, all in French. Nevertheless, I have come out with some gems. Earlier today I found myself telling one of the administrators that "my boyfriend Alison and I have been expecting that the packet-parcel-thingy will arrive yesterday."

The only reason my French teachers aren't all rolling in their graves is that none of them are dead.

oh France

Graffito on an overpass near the outskirts of Paris:

CECI N'EST PAS UN TAG

Even spray-paint artists here are witty.