If you are to tell a friend, “Ich am ful seek” to tell them you aren’t feeling well, congratulations, you are very likely dead (which explains the whole “not feeling well” thing).

The phrase is Middle English which hasn’t been spoken in 525 years. Middle English eventually evolved into Early Modern English, the form of English that Shakespeare used, but the writer considered to be the “father of English literature” who played a crucial role in shaping the English language was Chaucer, and he wrote exclusively in Middle English.

At a time when most literature in England was still composed in French or Latin, Chaucer helped to legitimize English as a literary language. In the short video clip below, you can hear what Middle English sounded like when several million people spoke it hundreds of years ago:

Back in 2001 when audiences were watching Heath Ledger and Paul Bettany in the film, A Knight’s Tale, many viewers didn’t know they were watching a story inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Though the movie doesn’t make reference to a dog, the mention of “alaunt” appeared in the written text of Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale where he described the entourage of Lycurgus, the king of Thrace, being accompanied by twenty large hunting dogs each as large a a young bull circling his chariot.  He wrote:

“Aboute his char ther wenten white alaunt twenty and mo, as gret as any stere to hunten at the leon or the dere”

Chaucer was describing Mastiffs. “Gret as any stere” referred to their size being as large as a young steer. The word he used, “alaunt,” came from Old French which reflected the influence of Norman French on English vocabulary after the Norman Conquest. “Alaunt” is still used in English heraldry to describe the figure of a Mastiff with cropped ears on a coat of arms (the arms of Woode (c. 1460) features an “alaunt” in a statant posture), though the use of  ‘alaunt’ is uncommon,  the standard terms for ‘dog’ being more along the lines of  “hound,” “talbot,” “greyhound,” or simply “mastiff.”  Mastiffs appear in this image, a detail of the Legion of Honor’s Torrijos ceiling, the coat of arms of Gutierre de Cárdenas (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco/Photography by Randy Dodson © courtesy of Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco).

Image: Mastiff watercolor by STOCKYE STUDIO/Adobe