THOU is the subject (Thou art…) THEE is the object (I look at thee) THY is for words beginning in a consonant (Thy dog) THINE is for words beginning in a vowel (Thine eyes)
this has been a psa
Also, because H was sometimes treated as a vowel when the grammar rules for thou/thee/thy/thine were formed,THINE can also be used for words beginning with H. For example, both “thy heart” and “thine heart” appear in Elizabethan poetry.
For consistency, however, if you’re saying “thine eyes”, make sure you also say “mine eyes” instead of “my eyes”.
Further to the PSA:
Thou/thee/thine is SINGULAR ONLY.
Verbs with “thou” end in -st or -est: thou canst, thou hast, thou dost, thou goest. Exception: the verbs will, shall, are, and were, which add only -t: thou wilt, thou shalt, thou art, thou wert.
Only in the indicative, though – when saying how things are (“Thou hast a big nose”). Not in the subjunctive, saying how things might be (“If thou go there…”) nor in the imperative, making instructions or requests (“Go thou there”).
The -eth or -th ending on verbs is EXACTLY EQUIVALENT TO THE -(e)s ENDING IN MODERN ENGLISH.
I go, thou goest, she goeth, we go, ye go, they go.
If you wouldn’t say “goes” in modern English, don’t say “goeth” in Shakespearean English.
“Goeth and getteth me a coffee” NO. KILL IT WITH FIRE.
Usually with an imperative you put the pronoun immediately after the verb, at least once in the sentence (“Go thou” / “Go ye”).
YE is the subject (Ye are…). YOU is the object.
Ye/you/your is both for PLURALS and for DEFERENCE, as vous in French.
There’s more, but that’ll do for now.
Oh wow. Reblogging for reference.
i haven’t had my coffee yet, so all i can think of when i read through this is:
th’ain’t
th’dstn’t’ve
AND ANOTHER THING “thee/thou/thy” is informal “ye/you/your” is formal Also also…all of this is NOT Old English but is actually referred to as Early Modern English. If you were speaking Old English, it would sound closer to German.
^That.
And IT’S NOT MORE FORMAL to use THEE.
if you address someone you should use Thee or Ye (sometime used as the plural, sometimes it’s still Thee, rules are iffy) to as You, it’s an insult by intentional distance. If you call someone you should call You by Thee, it can be an insult via assumed intimacy.
(This is why some religions insist on still using Thee and Thou when talking to their Father God. Many of them modernly think it makes them sound more formal, but that’s not why the usage began, or why the more linguistically aware still do it. Not because it’s more formal, but because it’s LESS formal. You wouldn’t call your own Father “You” unless you wanted to imply disowning Him.)
Anyone you’re close to or on first name terms with can be Thee. Friends, family members, etc.
Anyone you want to point out is NOT your friend, respectfully or otherwise, is You. Which is why the King is still Your Majesty. You are decidedly not his friend unless you know each other really well. (See “Henry V”. If you can also call Henry by Harry or Hal, you can probably call him Thee.
One more note! “Ye Olde- as you see on shop signs is not prounounced Yee. There’s a character called a Thorn that was going out of style and being replaced by a curly thing that looks like a Y and IS NOT. It’s pronounced Th. THe olde apothecary shoppe. Not Ye Olde. That itself promptly went out of style as well but the error remains almost traditional.
and I am not addressing claims that I might be a vampire, lycanthrope, or other immortal just because I am fluent in Modern Middle English.
This whole post is a blessing because I read so much “ye olde” speak in historical stuff and everyone always gets their thee’s and thou’s wrong. Even big name authors with accuracy editors who ought to know better.
It’s more accurate to have your “poor folk” in your historical novel saying “thou” than it is to have the scholar or rich man with an education rooted in Latin, unless he’s down the pub with his mates, merry as a knave.
The whole thing just reminds me of people using Polonius’ speech in Hamlet (“to thine own self be true”), completely out of context, not realizing that the speech is intended to show Polonius as a foolish old hypocrite who enjoys dishing out council but rarely follows his own convoluted advice, which is often contradictory and falsely pious.
Which, I mean, Shakespeare often isn’t taught well outside of higher education, lets be honest. So why would they know unless they’ve studied it beyond the passing glance it gets that one year in high school before been relegated to the position of “too posh and old to be relevant” which is entirely not true.
Shakespeare is written in the language of the people, and is often more insightful and progressive than certain types of academics would like you to believe.
the old-timers I played with back in Iowa used to say “it’s good enough for folk music” when we got tired of tuning and now it’s entered my vocabulary as an all-purpose useful phrase for beating back perfectionism.
sure, i could make this closer to perfect if i put in more time and effort and there might be circumstances under which that’s a good idea, but for now i’ll get more joy and use out of it if i just accept the kind of wonky version and keep going.
Some variants of this I’ve heard, if folk music isn’t your jam:
Good Enough For Shakespeare (used to justify odd word choices, cliche’d plot devices, and putting Dick Jokes in the middle of serious work)
Good Enough For Government Work (Used when you can’t finagle the math so you round up and get on with your life)
Good Enough For Saint Anthony (used by my Catholic Grandmother, usually when something went wrong in the kitchen)
Good Enough For The Lutherans (Used by catholic great-aunt, usually when we were running late for something)
Good Enough For Fish And Biscuits (Great-Uncle Francis said this all the tie and I have no idea what it means but the man was an overwhelming sucess at life so I guess it works)
I would like to add that this is literally a way of life for some New Zealanders, vis: “She’ll be right, mate!”
Legolas pretty quickly gets in the habit of venting about his travelling companions in Elvish, so long as Gandalf & Aragorn aren’t in earshot they’ll never know right?
Then about a week into their journey like
Legolas: *in Elvish, for approximately the 20th time* ugh fucking hobbits, so annoying
Frodo: *also in Elvish, deadpan* yeah we’re the worst
Legolas:
~*~earlier~*~
Legolas: ugh fucking hobbits
Merry: Frodo what’d he say
Frodo: I’m not sure he speaks a weird dialect but I think he’s insulting us. I should tell him I can understand Elvish
i mean, honestly it’s amazing the Elves had as many languages and dialects as they did, considering Galadriel (for example) is over seven thousand years old.
english would probably have changed less since Chaucer’s time, if a lot of our cultural leaders from the thirteenth century were still alive and running things.
they’ve had like. seven generations since the sun happened, max.
frodo’s books are old to him, but outside any very old poetry copied down exactly, the dialect represented in them isn’t likely to be older than the Second Age, wherein Aragorn’s foster-father Elrond started out as a very young adult and grew into himself, and Legolas’ father was born.
so like, three to six thousand years old, maybe, which is probably a drop in the bucket of Elvish history judging by all the ethnic differentiation that had time to develop before Ungoliant came along, even if we can’t really tell because there weren’t years to count, before the Trees were destroyed.
plus a lot of Bilbo’s materials were probably directly from Elrond, whose library dates largely from the Third Age, probably, because he didn’t establish Imladris until after the Last Alliance. and Elrond isn’t the type to intentionally help Bilbo learn the wrong dialect and sound sillier than can be helped, even if everyone was humoring him more than a little.
so Frodo might sound hilariously formal for conversational use (though considering how most Elves use Westron he’s probably safe there) and kind of old-fashioned, but he’s not in any danger of being incomprehensible, because elves live on such a ridiculous timescale.
to over-analyse this awesome and hilarious post even more, legolas’ grandfather
was from linguistically stubborn Doriath and their family is actually from a
somewhat different, higher-status ethnic background than their subjects.
so depending on how much of a role Thranduil took in his
upbringing (and Oropher in his), Legolas may have some weird stilted old-fashioned speaking tics in his
Sindarin that reflect a more purely Doriathrin dialect rather than the Doriathrin-influenced Western Sindarin that became the most widely spoken Sindarin long before he was born, or he might have a School Voice
from having been taught how to Speak Proper and then lapse into really
obscure colloquial Avari dialect when he’s being casual. or both!
considering legolas’ moderately complicated political position, i expect he can code-switch.
…it’s
also fairly likely considering the linguistic politics involved that Legolas is reasonably articulate in Sindarin, though
with some level of accent, but knows approximately zero Quenya outside of loanwords into Sindarin, and even those he mostly didn’t learn as a kid.
which would be extra hilarious when he and gimli fetch up in Valinor in his little homemade skiff, if the first elves he meets have never been to Middle Earth and they’re just standing there on the beach reduced to miming about what is the short beard person, and who are you, and why.
this is elvish dialects and tolkien, okay. there’s a lot of canon material! he actually initially developed the history of middle-earth specifically to ground the linguistic development of the various Elvish languages!
Legolas: Alas, verily would I have dispatched thine enemy posthaste, but y’all’d’ve pitched a feckin’ fit.
Aragorn: *eyelid twitching*
Frodo: *frantically scribbling* Hang on which language are you even speaking right now
Pippin, confused: Is he not speaking Elvish?
Frodo, sarcastically: I dunno, are you speaking Hobbit?
Boromir, who has been lowkey pissed-off at the Hobbits’ weird dialect this whole time: That’s what it sounds like to me.
Merry, who actually knows some shit about Hobbit background: We are actually speaking multiple variants of the Shire dialect of Westron, you ignorant fuck.
Sam, a mere working-class country boy: Honestly y’all could be talkin Dwarvish half the time for all I know.
Pippin, entering Gondor and speaking to the castle steward: hey yo my man
So the topic of “queer as a slur” came up in a fb conversation and my answer pretty much distilled out a lot of things that Tumblr has been saying for a while on the subject, as well as my personal experience.
See, here’s the thing. I marched in the streets using the word Queer as a word of power. “We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it.” We worked hard to reclaim that word and it’s been publicly reclaimed longer than the word “gay” has, tbh. Gay was being used as an insult within the last decade. We had to do a coordinated public service campaign to get people to stop using it to mean “bad”.
Queer studies have been a thing for decades. Academics study “Queer theory”. It IS the one word we have that is inclusive, and the only reason people keep editing themselves out of it is because of a concentrated campaign from trans exclusionists, which got picked up by biphobes and aphobes and everyone who is not comfortable with the umbrella being inclusive.
This is an act of infiltration and subversion from conservative elements. It’s a common tactic for conservatives and right wingers to send people into groups and twist the message to divide the group. Radical feminists got in bed with the religious right on the subject of sex work, and used the inherent isolationist tendencies of the gay and lesbian community to make it sound like there are “limited resources” which “shouldn’t be divided among too many people”… which is completely the opposite of the truth, which is that the larger the umbrella, the more people working together, the more collective power people have to change things to be better for everyone.
It hurts NOTHING to be loving and open and accepting of everyone who says, “I’m not straight, and I’m on your side.”
We don’t get to second-guess people’s identities. We don’t. That’s sacred. And people who reject “queer” are doing just that.
I identify as queer. Every time someone says “q-slur” or shies away from saying the name of my identity, they’re giving MY WORD back to the assholes.
So I flat out don’t trust people who say “q-slur” or act like my identity is a bad word. People who do that are stating loud and clear that they don’t value me, don’t see me as a person, and that my identity, the word that means the most about who I am, is “bad” to them.
It makes me think that people who use that word are listening too much to bigots and not enough to the most marginalized people in this ridiculous attempt at community.
I marched in the street for my word. People DIED for my word. Fuck yeah, it was a slur. But it’s not when I use it. It’s not when people use it as a positive identifier. Because we fucking reclaimed it.
You know what else was a slur? Gay. Lesbian. Trans. Even bisexual has been used to mock people. We don’t have many words that weren’t slurs, because what makes a word a slur is not the word itself, but how it is used.
People use “woman” as a slur, when they speak the word like a sledgehammer. But there is nothing inherently derogatory about the word.
When I say “Queer” I’m saying “You’re welcome here. The storm is scary out here, but my umbrella is big and we accept you. We welcome you. We CHERISH you.”
When someone refuses my word? They say the umbrella is not for me, and I do not accept that.
From a 9th century Irish manuscript, the phrase ‘massive hangover’ (Latheirt) written in the ancient Irish text Ogham. The monk must have been having a very rough day…..
So you know what I don’t get? Why people repeat words. (x)
Grammar time: it’s called “contrastive reduplication,” and it’s a form of intensification that is relatively common. Finnish does a very similar thing, and others use near-reduplication (rhyme-based) to intensify, like Hungarian (pici ‘tiny’, ici-pici ‘very tiny’).
Even the typologically-distant group of Bantu languages utilize reduplication in a strikingly similar fashion with nouns: Kinande oku-gulu ‘leg’, oku-gulu-gulu ‘a REAL leg’ (Downing 2001, includes more with verbal reduplication as well).
I suppose the difficult aspect of English reduplication is not through this particular type, but the fact that it utilizes many other types of reduplication: baby talk (choo-choo, no-no), rhyming (teeny-weeny, super-duper), and the ever-famous “shm” reduplication: fancy-schmancy (a way of denying the claim that something is fancy).
screams my professor was trying to find an example of reduplication so the next class he came back and said “I FOUND REDUPLICATION IN ENGLISH” and then he said “Milk milk” and everyone was just “what?” and he said “you know when you go to a coffee shop and they ask if you want soy milk and you say ‘no i want milk milk’” and everyone just had this collective sigh of understanding.
Another name for this particular construction is contrastive focus reduplication, and there’s a famous linguistics paper about it which is commonly known as the Salad Salad Paper. You know, because if you want to make it clear that you’re not talking about pasta salad or potato salad, you might call it “salad salad”. The repetition indicates that you’re intending the most prototypical meaning of the word, like green salad or cow’s milk, even though other things can be considered types of salad or milk.
@deadcatwithaflamethrower because you’re the first language nerd i can think of to @ this at right now ;D
a friend of mine forgot the word “lamp” once and said “light faucet”
I’m shaking from laughter. Yes, this is the right way to start a Friday morning.
Listen guys, I have a BA in English and an MA in Professional Writing and I have:
Forgotten the word “gums” and called them “teeth cuticles” Forgotten the term “liquor store” and called it a “rum-o-rama” Forgotten the word “mohawk” and called it a “head mustache”
The list goes on and on. Wording is HARD.
You know that putty you put in holes before you paint a wall? I forgot the word “putty,” called it “hole-be-gone” instead, and now my whole family refers to it as hole-be-gone.
it’s hard to make the brain do the english, ok!?
I wish I had this skill. When I lose a word, my brain derails. I use the term ‘derail’ because it is the mental equivalent of a train derailment (just easier to clean up)
At the staff meeting, my boss referred to the clipboard as “that snappy board”
My 4-year-old nephew didn’t know the word “knuckle” so he told us his finger knee hurt.
I forgot the word “speech” once so I said “you wrote me an essay with your mouth”
Dad once temporarily had the term “auto body filler” leave his brain; the Canadian Tire worker had her whole day made when he cheerfully said, “I’m here to procure some…car-spackle!”
I once forgot the work barrel so I described it as a round wooden box and then something “pirates put rum in it” before my mate figured out what I meant.
Oh god. Here we go.
Once upon a time, I had a lot of trouble communicating with friends. It could be argued that I still do.
In my first year of high school, I was talking to this one girl who I’ll call Lullaby. We had literally every class together, so we started hanging out all the time.
During lunch, we had a conversation about our experiences dating girls vs. dating guys in a sexual manner. We get back and we go to the rest of our classes, and she starts out the door.
What I WANT to say is “Come back”
Of course my brain decides that there are synonyms to words that sound like that, since it won’t actually word.
I blurt out, in front of half of my class.
“Ejaculate back!”
I do this a lot.
Here are some good ones:
I stepped on something gross and it got between my toes, and in my distress I referred to my toes as “feet teeth.”
I was very proud to have finished the “plate laundry.”
I told my ex to go look in the garage, only I said “car pantry.”
But my VERY FAVORITE is when I couldn’t remember the word for brown, so I called it “boring purple.”
>
I once forgot the work barrel so I described it as a round wooden box and then something “pirates put rum in it” before my mate figured out what I meant.
“Something pirates put rum in” is usually “pirates” in my experience.
Look, I still maintain “food closet” is a perfectly acceptable term if you can’t remember “pantry”.
Conversely I once forgot the term “linen closet” and told my mum to get a sheet from the Blanket Pantry.
I’m an anglophone living in Europe, and I keep having this problem not because I forget a word, but because I forget which English dialect someone else speaks (or don’t know).
The past week featured ‘hot potato rectangles’ (because i was unsure what ‘chips’ would mean to my friend).
Don’t even get me started on the holes in the wall that make the electrikkity go.
Steel Phoenix Studios 