Chaucer is consistently thought of as the oldest poet to exert a benevolent but deep influence on later poetic tradition in England and by extension, on all Anglophone writing. Chaucer's language is known as “Middle English,” the language written and spoken in England between around 1100 and 1500. Old English is classified as a Germanic language, as are Middle English and Modern English, too. Chaucer was also the first English poet to translate extensively from Italian. The misleading myth of Chaucer inaugurating poetry in English can be read as a symptom of proud nationalist ideology that wants to conflate literary greatness with linguistic inventiveness, and that feeds the idea that English poetry and the English language developed more or less in splendid insular isolation. It also falls prey to the desire to attribute the effects of wide-ranging social and cultural change to one influential genius, and is part of a self-perpetuating circle.