4:24pm October 4, 2014

a PSA about archaic English

chordatesrock:

If it sounds like Shakespeare wrote it, it’s Early Modern English. Thou is used as an intimate second-person pronoun, and some verbs in the third-person present tense end in -eth. Otherwise, it should be mostly comprehensible to speakers of modern English.

(An example of Early Modern English: “When I did hear the motley fool thus moral on the time, my lungs began to crow like chanticleer, that fools should be so deep-contemplative.” —Shakespeare, As You Like It)

If it sounds like Chaucer wrote it, it’s Middle English. The words will be strange, it will sometimes seem like nonsense, but at a glance it will look like English: it uses the same alphabet and roughly similar distribution of letters. If you can’t understand a word of it and you don’t think it’s Old English, it’s Middle English.

(An example of Middle English: “In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay redy to wenden on my pilgrymage to Caunterbury with ful devout corage, at nyght was come into that hostelrye wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye of sondry folk, by aventure yfalleIn felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle, that toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.” —Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales)

If it looks like a different language and uses a slightly different alphabet from modern English, and looks sort of like Latin except it uses thorn (þ) or eth (ð) and none of the words are even slightly similar, it’s Old English. This is basically a different language from modern English.

(An example of Old English: “Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum, si þin nama gehalgod. To becume þin rice, gewurþe ðin willa, on eorðan swa swa on heofonum. Urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg, and forgyf us ure gyltas, swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum. And ne gelæd þu us on costnunge, ac alys us of yfele. Soþlice.” —the Wessex Gospel)

Yay, someone else who knows!

Also, that passage from the Wessex Gospel is The Lord’s Prayer (The Our Father). Brother #3 (the classicist) read it at our wedding (we had a medieval wedding).