Did people ever really speak olde english like Shakespeare wrote? or were all the writers just prententious?
Actually, Shakespeare wrote in earlye moderne Englishe…err, early modern English. Shakespeare does use things like iambic pentameter, which an average person wouldn’t speak in, but in terms of vocabulary, maybe part of the reason it seems pretentionious is that a lot of the words used have fallen out of modern use.
You wouldn’t understand much old English, y clept.
Speaking of “ye”, what is the correct pronunciation. I’ve read that “y” was a way of making “th”, so “ye” would be pronounced “the”; but does/did anyone pronounce it “the”? Or is the correct pronunciation actually “ye”?
The correct pronounciation is ‘the’, but it’s okay to say ‘ye’ when you’re trying to be funny.
English had several non-Latin letters that have since fallen out of use. Two of them represented ‘th’ sounds - thorn (þ) and eth (ð), and they were fairly interchangeable, although thorn was preferred for the voiceless ‘th’ (as in ‘think’) and eth for the voiced (as in ‘they’). Eth dropped out earlier than thorn, and when we started printing in English, we didn’t have type for thorn (we got the press from the Dutch, I believe, and they didn’t need nor use thorn), which was written similarly to a Y at the time, so we used the closest letter we had. Thus, ‘Ye Olde Malt Shoppe’.
Lodrain is very close to on target. However, in addition to edh and thorn (which one can at least represent on a computer), the old English alphabet also had a letter wen which was very much similar to the thorn character but instead of the curve in the þ had two straight lines at an angle meeting at a point. Initial wen was sounded more or less as a Y. Now contemplate the ease of confusion between the article þe (the) with a thorn and the pronoun þe (ye), nominative for “you,” written with a wen. Then contemplate that in rapid lettering wen and Y are written fairly similarly.
And yes, while much of prose was “quality” writing rather than reproducing speech, people did indeed talk with things that have dropped out of use. Just as normal Romans used the ablative absolute, English speakers used the nominative absolute, all other things being equal. I wist that we wot what English wanteth in our modern usage.
Old English: 450-1100 A.D.
Middle English: 1100-1500 A.D.
Early Modern English: 1500-1750 A.D.
Modern English: 1750 A.D.-present
Shakespeare was thus smack in the middle of Early Modern English.
“Old” English is a foreign language to us despite its name, according to Tom Burnam in Dictionary of Misniformation. The only surviving work from the real Old English period is *Beowulf,*which, if we were to try to read it today (even set up in a modern font), would be be incomprehensible to a modern English speaker: the first two words are “Beowulf mathelode,” meaning “Beowulf spoke.”
As for Middle English, the famous beginning of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is:
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote (“When that April with its sweet showers”–the word “its” did not appear until Shakespeare’s time). To pronounce it, pronounce the vowels as you would in Spanish or Italian, and remember that in Chaucer’s time every vowel was pronounced.
And from Wycliffe-Purvey’s translation of the Bible, Matthew 11:12:
And fro the daies of Joon Baptist hitherto the kyngdom of heuenes suffrith violence, and violent men rauyschen it. (“violence” was pronounced vee-oh-LENNSS in 1388.)
In a modern translation it’s rendered as “But from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of the heavens is the goal toward which men press, and those that press forward are seizing it.”
Of course, there are no clear lines for dividing the evolution of Ingglyche*. These dates were probably chosen because of historical context.
In 1060, Willy (I can’t remember his last name, was it ‘the Conquerer’?) conquered England. The generation after would have been the time Ingglyche started to change drastically. So 1100 was chosen as a good estimate for when Middle Ingglyche began.
But, Middle Ingglyche really had no form of its own. The period from 1100-1500 was a transition period, sort of like an adolescence, and the Ingglyche spoken in 1100 would sound weird to someone from 1200, &c.
1500 was chosen because that’s when Ingglyche started to look like Modern Ingglyche. Now, Modern Ingglyche is usually the whole group, and it’s divided into; Early Modern Ingglyche and Modern Ingglyche.
The date I’ve always known was about 1650 for Modern Ingglyche, because this is about the time the first prescriptive dictionary was made. What I mean is, this is when they started writing down rules for the language and imposing them on the people. I guess it may have taken a generation or two for the trend to catch on, so whoever you got your dates from decided to set it at 1750 instead.
*Ingglyche. Ain’t it cool? Some guy showed me this on another web forum, so I vowed to always use it.
PS: http://www.wordorigins.org is about what the URL suggests. It has a forum where you can ask questions like this.
Nonsense. This is not the opening line of Beowulf (see this link to see the correct opening) & this is certainly not the only surviving example of Old English, or even of Old English poetry. Who knows what “period” this is anyway–attempts to date this poem & many other Old English texts differ by several centuries.
Gjorp writes:
> Of course, there are no clear lines for dividing the evolution of
> Ingglyche*. These dates were probably chosen because of
> historical context.
Well, of course there’s no clear dividing lines. Language doesn’t work that way. A language just slowly changes until eventually someone from one period couldn’t understand someone from a previous period. It’s not even really clear that language changes faster or slower in different periods. If you don’t pick a arbitary point for dividing up the language into periods, you’d have no way to speak of the different stages of English. But these are the standard dates for the periods. I got them from The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.
> *Ingglyche. Ain’t it cool?
No, it’s pointlessly annoying.
> But, Middle Ingglyche really had no form of its own.
What the heck do you mean by that? No form?
To Ndorward:
Perhaps you are right about the short phrase I used not being the very beginning of Beowulf; it was the beginning of the passage quoted by Burnam and shown in a photostat of the manuscript in the hardbound edition of his book Dictionary of Misniformation (1975, Crowell; pp. 168ff.)
The passage Burnam quoted, in full:
Beowulf mathelode bearn ecgtheowes
hwaet we the thas saelac sunu healfdenes
leod scyldinga lustrum brohton tires
to tacne the thu her to locast…
Translated into understandable English, this reads:
"Beowulf, son of Ecgtheow, said “Lo, we [bring] to you this sea-booty, as a token which you see here.” (I cannot translate Old English myself: I tried to render Burnam’s word-for-word translation into passable English.)
Burnam’s own words, on p. 169:
“The only manuscript of any length that survives from the real Old English period is that of Beowulf–and it is sheer luck that it does survive, since it was very nearly destroyed by a fire in the library of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton…”
Excuse me–I left out the third line, trans;ated; when added, it reads:
*…sea-booty, (son of Healfdene, Lord of the Scyldings [with] joy [you] have brought; glories) as a token…
:o
dougie_monty, I think what Burnam meant was that the manuscript of Beowulf is the only complete manuscript that survives from that period. (Even then, I’m not sure that assertion is right.) Please note, the manuscript (physical bunch of pages) is not the same as the text (the words written on the pages). We have a large, rich assortment of Old English texts still surviving. “Disinformation,” indeed!
The earliest known Old English literature is the poetry of Cædmon, the first poet in English, from about the 7th century. He was an illiterate farmhand, who one night was awoken by an angel and told to sing God’s praises. Just as in the story of Prophet Muhammad’s first encounter with Gabriel, he replied that he didn’t know how. But the angel insisted, and so he spontaneously declaimed his first poem:
Nu sculon herigean heofonrices Weard
Meotodes meahte and his modgeþanc
weorc Wuldor-Fæder swa he wundra gehwæs
ece Drihten or onstealde
He ærest sceop ielda bearnum
heofon to hrofe halig Scyppend
ða middangeard moncynnes Weard
ece Drihten æfter teode
firum foldan Frea ælmihtig
Now we must praise heaven-kingdom’s Guardian,
the Measurer’s might and his mind-plans,
the work of the Glory-Father, when he of wonders every one,
eternal Lord, the beginning established.
He first created for men’s sons
heaven as a roof, holy Creator;
then Middle-Earth mankind’s Guardian,
eternal Lord, afterwards made—
for men earth, Master almighty.
(Note that this poem is the earliest source for the name “Middle-Earth” (middangeard) appropriated by J. R. R. Tolkien, the twentieth century’s greatest master of Old English.)
The real opening lines of Beowulf go:
Hwæt! we Gar-Dena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon—
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!
Yes, we have heard of the glory of the Spear-Danes’ kings in the old days—how the princes of that people did brave deeds.
(Translation by F. Klaeber and J. C. Pope, from the Norton Anthology.)
This is complete nonsense, unless Burnam has a very strange definition of “length” or else a very strange definition of “real Old English period.” I’d vote for the latter myself; I think he might be pushing for a really early date for Beowulf and believe that later works are somehow “less authentic.” (Does he, by any chance, claim that Beowulf is an essentially pagan poem and all references to Christianity are interpolations? If so, he’s almost certainly wrong about this, but at least he’s wrong in a somewhat understandable way, while denying the existence of other lengthy OE manuscripts is just bizarre.)
if you want to hear some Olde English , this link is good http://www.wwnorton.com/nael/noa/
It’s a real hout to listen ; it sounds like somebody from Iceland.
Can we please cut the fighting? I think that we can at least agree that Beowulf is the best-known example of Old English literature, and it serves quite well to illustrate the point that Old English and Modern English are mutually incomprehensible (and that what Shakespeare was writing in was not Old English). I have heard, however, that Old English and modern Dutch are very similar.
Chronos writes:
> I have heard, however, that Old English and modern Dutch are
> very similar.
Well, not really. It’s true that fifth century Dutch was very close to Old English (and, in fact, Frisian is even closer), but Dutch and Frisian have changed in the past fifteen centuries just as English has. (Note: Frisian is a language spoken in the Netherlands.) A modern Dutch or Frisian speaker couldn’t understand Old English any better than a modern English speaker could.
Thanks, Chronos; I think my original point–the great difference between Old English and modern English–wsa made, Burnam’s appraisal of the integrity and authenticity of Beowulf notwithstanding. 
There’s another point made not by Tom Burnam but by Dr. Rudolph Fleisch (Why Johnny Can’t Read) in his book The Art of Plain Talk. Fleisch noted (he wrote this around the end of World War II) that, while we pretty much settled into our present spelling, pounctuation, and grammar around the time of Shakespeare, Milton, and the King James Bible, the writing style of that era was elaborate and slow, while today it’s informal and fast. The fact that Shakespeare’s works and the King James Version were both rendered in Early Modern English does not, of course, guarantee that they are easy to understand to modern (i.e., the year A. D. 2002) English readers.
For what it’s worth, neither Tom Burnam nor Rudolph Fleisch are the best people to quote on the history of the English language. Tom Burnam is a writer of trivia books (sort of a minor-league Cecil Adams, in fact). Rudolph Fleisch was an expert on elementary education, I think. Neither of them has their facts quite straight about the history of English. Saying that “we pretty much settled into our present spelling, pounctuation, and grammar around the time of Shakespeare, Milton, and the King James Bible” is a pretty odd statement. When exactly would that be? Let’s see: Hamlet was written in 1600. Paradise Lost was published in 1667. The King James Bible came out in 1611. So that’s not a specific date in any case.
But the real problem is that a language never settles into a fixed set of pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar habits and stays there for a long time. (Into a fixed spelling and punctuation perhaps, but that’s a different thing. Those can be determined by a panel of authoritative experts rather than by the speakers of the language.) Language is always slowly changing. If you want to set the boundary between Early Modern English and Modern English at 1650, or at 1700, or at 1750, it isn’t a big deal, because ultimately it will be an arbitrary decision.
To Wendell Wagner: I don’t think we need to be that exact. That’s a total of 68 years. How much different was the writing style of English–let along spelling, punctuation, and grammar, in 1934? I have read things as different as A Child’s Geography of the World (written by Virgil Hillyer, who died in 1931), John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939), and Try and Stop Me (Bennett Cerf, 1944). The writing style of these three books, published about 12 years apart, was extremely different; and I would expect Hamlet, Paradise Lost, and the King James Bible to be in different styles chiefly by dint of their content, not their era (The fact that the King James Bible was set up with each verse being an individual paragraph doesn’t help matters). And just suppose Tom Burnam, Robert Ripley, Elsie Hix, Doug Storer, or George Stimpson had written the Straight Dope books. Wouldn’t the style be radically different?