In the old Anglo-Saxon way he rhymes letters at the start of words, and as these are mostly consonants his accent is sharp, throaty and close to lowland Scots. But Chaucer's voice is more southern as well as more northern than the British queen's accent today. He uses the speech of a court which spoke French as readily as English, and worshipped God in Latin services chanted with Italian accents - over 400 years of close dealing between the churches of Rome and Britain ensured that. On the left pages I try to suggest Chaucer's singing lilt by signs over vowels we now neglect. I suggest the northern sharpness by putting ch for the neglected gh , as most of us can read how it used to sound at the end of loch and Bach.
All translations hint at the original by a more or less cranky blending of sense and sound.
The crankiness of my version should turn you to the original quite quickly. Chaucer's first sentence is a whole verse of nine rhymed couplets. Their rhythm is not the jog- trot of the Mandeville rhymer's couplets, not the martial stride of Barbour's. Chaucer's lines are nearly as long as the lines of the Gawain poet and Langland, so like them each line holds two well balanced phrases. In a long rhyming couplet the second line usually sounds so final that Shakespeare only used such couplets singly, to conclude his sonnets and play scenes.