About

The Middle English Phonologizer applies a set of spelling-to-sound rules drawn from standard handbooks of Middle English phonology, parameterised by dialect (e.g. East Midlands, West Midlands, Northern, Southern, Kentish) and period (early, central, late, or transitional Middle English).

The London dialect follows East Midland spelling-to-sound rules; under the Transitional period (c.1450–1500) it additionally applies the first raising step of the Great Vowel Shift, approximating the innovative late-15th-century London accent. Pair London with Central (c.1250–1400) for a Chaucerian reading, which predates the GVS.

The Natural spelling toggle renders the output in a reader-friendly respelling rather than strict IPA. Syllable counts are shown alongside the input to aid metrical reading.

Latin spans. Macaronic Latin (Vulgate quotations, liturgical tags) can be marked with {la: …} to signal an embedded Latin passage, e.g. And lo, {la: In principio erat verbum}, bifore al. Inside a tagged span, grapheme-level conventions (soft c and g before front vowels, the minim rules) still apply — approximating how an English cleric would have read the Latin aloud — but Middle-English-only processes are suppressed: no schwa reduction of unstressed vowels, no MEOSL, no final-e collapse, no OE-etymon lookups, and no stress marks (Latin stress is penultimate / antepenultimate rather than initial). Untagged Latin is run through the full ME pipeline and will sound mumbled.

The tool is intended for students and readers of Chaucer and other Middle English texts — not a definitive reconstruction. Regional and chronological variation in Middle English is vast, and any automated system inevitably smooths over real ambiguity.