la belle damoiselle sans vie (damosel) wrote in flagstones, @ 2010-12-05 00:39:00 |
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Current mood: | chipper |
Entry tags: | resource: language |
reposted by request:
So you're writing a character from some vaguely medieval setting, and you want his dialogue to reflect the fact, without getting it hideously wrong? You have come to the right page: the Complete Noob's Guide to what the untutored masses call Old English, but which is actually an early form of Modern English.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a linguist or historian or expert of any kind; I just have an ear for this kind of thing and a pedantic streak a mile wide. This is meant to help writers and roleplayers "sound right" to the average reader. This page should not be cited in your research paper. /END DISCLAIMER
Thou is nominative/subjective, thee is accusative/objective. Since I can never remember the technical terms either, I'll break it down for you: thou dost stuff, stuff is done to thee. Convert your sentence to third person; where you have he/she, you want thou, where you have him/her, you want thee.
(In certain canons, and I believe certain extant dialects as well, you will get stuff like "thee is", but generally speaking that comes off looking countrified or just plain odd, so stick to what I tell you here unless it seems necessary to do otherwise.)
Thy is to thine as my is to mine, except where the possession in question begins with a vowel sound, in which case you have thine eye, or indeed mine eye.
Verbs go as follows, and pay attention here because messing this up is the number one mistake I see people making on the internets:
I... | am | do | have | will | should | go |
thou... | art | dost | hast | wilt | shouldst | goest |
he, she, or it... | is | doth | hath | will | should | goeth |
And that is pretty much how it works. You don't really need to use the -th form at all -- does and has are just as plausible -- but if you do, remember that it's third person, not second, and it gets dropped on words like "should" where it would be a huge pain to pronounce.
Wherefore, ladies and gentlebeings, does not mean "where"; it means "why". Why? Because. Wherefore? Therefore. Juliet was being rhetorical. Got it? Good.
With that out of the way, let's tackle all those exciting words like whither. Think of it like this: an -ither word is this-a-way, an -ence word is that-a-way. When in doubt, figure out what your character actually means, and check against this table:
From | To | |
---|---|---|
Here | hence | hither |
There | thence | thither |
Where? | whence | whither |
This gives us well-known phrases like get thee hence, meaning "you, get away from here", or whither thou goest, meaning "wherever you are going". (There are, incidentally, two H's in whither. Important distinction!)
Many people have it in their heads that "Old" English involves talking like Mr. Data and never using contractions. This is a misconception! Our ancestors were every bit as lazy as we are, although in some slightly different ways.
'Tis, 'twas, 'twill, all those are contractions. You can use I'm, he's, etc. as well as thou'rt if your character is talking quickly or informally; the ones that tend to stand out to the modern eye are the -n't variants, and you can often get around those by restructuring.
Wikipedia (yeah, yeah) sez:
Originally, thou was simply one of the singular counterparts to the plural pronoun ye, derived from an ancient Indo-European root. As with continental languages, thou was later used to express intimacy, familiarity, or even disrespect while another pronoun, you, the oblique/objective form of ye, was used for formal circumstances.
Those of you who've taken Spanish or French classes will recognize the pattern here. So you can play with that for various levels of nuance to your dialogue. Readers who are wise to this quirk will get your meaning; those who don't will at worst think you're inconsistent if, e.g., a character addresses his boyfriend as "you" in public and "thou" in private.