Interesting to see the two examples of pure inversion — How goes it? and What say you? — in modern English. The latter sounds slightly archaic or formal, while the former sounds highly *informal* and perhaps even jocularly sloppy. And oddly, the latter could be replaced by “What do you say?” even though it’s used only for a moment in time rather than an ongoing state; “What are you saying?” would mean something else entirely.
Very interesting. A bit later but when reading Jane Austen I noticed that she always put negative interrogatives, when people are speaking, with do support but never using contractions e.g., "Do not you agree, Mr Darcy?"
Was that because it was not commonly used then, or not by "those classes", or just that it was not put in printed books?
That's an excellent question! My understanding is that contractions formed from "not" have probably been around for 300–400 years, but seem to have been considered colloquial — you don't tend to see them in writing regularly (dialogue aside) until the 20th century.
Shakespeare sounds quite different and less accessible than other writings from around the same period like the King James Bible, Diary of Sam Pepys, etc. Is it because it is more idiomatic?
My guess would be that it's a combination of factors. One is that Shakespeare uses a lot of wordplay which often relies on pronunciations that are no longer obvious to us. Another factor is that we're often reading Shakespeare on a page as opposed to seeing and hearing it performed by actors who understand it well, so something is lost there.
Speaking of the King James Bible - I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian church where the KJV was considered to be the only divinely ordained translation. Preachers freely used Thee and Thou in their own prayers from the pulpit, and the general impression was that it was a heightened form of respect. Though I've long since left behind the religion, I experienced cognitive dissonance when I learned that these are actually the familiar, less honorific forms!
I don't suppose you know why the KJV translators chose to refer to their God in such familiar, intimate terms? (I assume they didn't intend to imply contempt.)
The Lord’s prayer in Spanish and French similarly use the familiar version of “your” in the translation of things like “hallowed by thy name. They kingdom come..” I suspect this is because there is an emotional charge to the relationship between oneself and God.
Do you refer to your father familiarly or formally? Based on Mr. Gorrie's article above, we Christians are encouraged to become familiar with God as Father and Jesus as Brother.
One of the great advantages of growing up in the north of England is that every school child already could understand this Shakespearean syntax. It was (and often still is) very common to say 'hast thou' or 'doest thou' even though they are now pronounced 'hasta' and 'dusta'. As an example, in the song 'Ilkley Moor' we get the line 'weer hasta bin sin Ah saw thee?'
Having moved all of 60 miles from the Black Country to north Derbyshire some time back, I am still amazed at the differences between our respective dialects. Over time one accommodates as they say, but just the other day I spoke to a lady from the local council who correctly identified my Heimat because I pronounced 'bus' as 'buz'.
Still, it would be interesting to compare levels of comprehension of Shakespeare in different regions of the world; English speaking and otherwise. I suspect we might find the results universally depressing.
I was born and grew up in Chapel-en-le-frith, and in my youth people would say that they could identify where someone was from to within six miles by their speech. Whilst this may no longer be true, I’m sure that ,but, is definitely a give-away!
Same in the Black Country. I suspect it's a remnant of the pre-industrial times when the various villages spoke distinct variations of regional dialects; comprehensible to their immediate neighbours but decreasingly so to those more than a few miles away.
I'm also reminded of the opening scene of Pygmalion where the linguist 'Enry 'Iggins claims he can identify the very street where someone was born.
I learned this from going to church, where our Book of Common Prayer sounded very much like the King James Bible.
I have a question: why do you put an apostrophe in thou's and thee's to indicate plural, as in "fond memories of those high school years poring over thou’s and thee’s?"
I don't really like the convention of using the apostrophe in those cases, but it seems to help readability, especially online, when it's not always clear I'm mentioning the word rather than using it.
I was just thinking about the King James Bible as well. The Church of England use a modern rendition of the Lord's Prayer, but I still have the King James version in my head because learnt it when I was three. "Leadeth us not" etc!
Our new prayer book uses modern verbiage for everything but the Lord’s Prayer, which it gives in both versions. My church (Episcopal, same as yours) prefers the old one.
A question on the present tense: Did they use verb inversion for that purpose? Would they have asked "What readest you/thou?" And I assume the proper answer would be "I read this blog post by Colin Gorrie."
It helps to write in Elizabethan English if you dabble in the telling of ancient stories as it sounds more authentic rather than if written in modern English. The difficulty is to find a balance. Sometimes one can overdo it and risk making mistakes, or under do it and sound too modern. Very useful article. I needed to save some content as reference. I copied some passages onto my notes. Sorry about that. Thanks.
Fascinating! I had never heard of “to thou”. But there is a direct parallel in French, *tutoyer*. “On peut tutoyer?” May I use tu (rather than the formal *vous*)?
Very interesting about do-support. You mention that it first came into usage in the 14th c. John McWhorter wrote a book about Celtic influence on English, and he asserts that the “do” particle came into English from the Celtic languages. In Irish, for instance, a question in the present and future tense and sometimes in the past tense is always formed with the particle “an”. Inversion is not possible; Irish is VSO anyway, and the reverse would be unintelligible regardless of tense. Welsh and Cumbric operate in a similar manner, as I understand it. I forget how I felt about the strength of his argument, but if he’s right could it have taken until the 14th century to penetrate the English language?
I love ( I am loving) Osweald Bera, by the way. Absolutely seamless way of coming to terms with old English. It comes very close to the Nature Method, which in my opinion a superior way to learn— my dream is to write such a book for Irish :-)
You're right to point out that the late timing of the emergence of do-support is the major issue with this kind of theory. Proponents of the Celtic hypothesis do have explanations for it, but I'd say that they haven't managed to win over the doubters (yet).
If you write such a book for Irish, I'll be the first in line to buy it!
Yes, 'thouing' and 'tutoyer' are very similar, especially because 'tu' is reserved for family, close friends, children, animals and the Almighty. In the Raleigh example, 'thou' is disrespectful, but only 'thou' will do for God. This always amuses me.
Another oddity is that 'thou' slowly fizzled out (although 'tha' is still used in Yorkshire), while French seems to be going the other way: in online chats and youtube videos, perfect strangers address each other as 'tu' all the time, and if I had to place a bet on it, I think 'vous' is the form more likely to fizzle out.
I wish I knew some Irish (I'm originally from England but I live in Ireland). I do love the coincidences, such as the way you can insert 'mile' into 'go raibh maith agat' and in Italian it's 'grazie mille'. In Britain, if you say 'thanks a million', people will think you're being sarcastic.
Anyway, I think someone should start an Elizabethan website called Thou Tube. I'd be up for that.
> So much social weight did thou have at the time that it could even be used as a verb, as in to thou someone, meaning ‘to use thou when addressing someone.’
Similar in Russian, including modern Russian: тыкать — to use singular ты. "Не тыкай тут мне!" = pretty much "don't you thou at me!"
Where does 'ye' fit in? Not as in 'ye olde' where we know it's really 'the'. But as in 'hear ye!'. Is it just an alternative spelling of 'you'?
Also: tenses in English are mad. You might say 'I am -ing' for something you're doing right then 'I am trying to sleep!'. But more often it indicates either something which is specifically ongoing, but probably not at the exact present time 'I am learning the piano'. Or it indicates the near future: someone who says 'I am going to France' is more likely to be making preparations than actually on the way.
WJC is right! "Ye," as in "hear ye", is the subject (nominative) form of "you." Eventually the two forms got confused and people started using the object (accusative) form "you' for both subjects and objects.
And you're right: English verb tenses are absolutely wild.
“Ye” is still used in Hiberno- English for you plural. As for the structure, there’s a parallel in Shakespeare’s Flewellen saying “Look, you”. That’s a guess on my part :)
I was taught by Irish sisters in grammar school who loved to point out odd (to us American kids) words. One I remember is "amn't" for "am not." And, of course, "'tis" for "it is."
Another excellent post which has sent my brain whirring!
I had no idea about the difference between thou and you (and to think that Sir Edmund is my (distant) cousin too, unleashing that badass thouing! That's fascinating and I wish I'd known that when I was studying Shakespeare.
It's so interesting how language from that period is intelligible (or seems to be) but there's comprehension slip-ups along the way.
Oh! And... When I was eleven, I went to Kentwell Hall in Suffolk. They pick a year in the Elizabethan or Stuart period and everyone there dresses, speaks etc as if it's that year. We were given a sheet of phrases, like a tourist given a phrasebook to go abroad. I tried very hard to learn it, but every time I tried to talk to the historic residents, I kept talking in French! It's really odd, but I wonder if Elizabethan English retained more Norman French, so that my brain went for the folder marked "French", instead of "English"?
There is another linguistic oddity, appearing in Yorkshire as 'yan, tan, tethera', as a set of sheep-counting numbers. An article in British Archaeology a long time ago found these sheep-counting numbers, which are clearly related to Welsh, Cornish or Cumbric, to be quite widespread in England. Some think they relate to widespread continuing Brittonic speaking. I suspect, as they are specifically related to sheep-counting, they more likely relate to Welsh-speaking shepherds recruited at the time post Black Death when many English villages were cleared for sheep. People said 'sheep doth eat up men'.
If they spoke Welsh to their sheep (and presumably dogs), they would have spoken Wenglish - English as spoken in Wales has more Welsh grammar than standard - and so, in the late mediaeval period, there may have been these influences coming from sufficiently low status people, but not in polite written English.
If people found the do-construct useful, it may have spread.
Are the am-constructs similar or are they more widely spread in Germanic languages?
What I can't believe is that I did 5 years of Shakespeare in secondary school without anyone ever explaining this to me. Mind you, I also did 5 years of French and no one explained "tu" vs. "vous" either.
Some languages adopted an indirect style of address as the polite you. German still has singular and plural familiar (ich und ihr) but uses Sie (they) for formal in both numbers. Spanish has usted/ustedes for the formal, shortened from Vuestra Merced, also a third-person form.
I wonder if They will become the new formal type in English?
Interesting to see the two examples of pure inversion — How goes it? and What say you? — in modern English. The latter sounds slightly archaic or formal, while the former sounds highly *informal* and perhaps even jocularly sloppy. And oddly, the latter could be replaced by “What do you say?” even though it’s used only for a moment in time rather than an ongoing state; “What are you saying?” would mean something else entirely.
What a crazy language!
It's wild how this archaic feature still survives in extremely informal speech. English is nuts!
Very interesting. A bit later but when reading Jane Austen I noticed that she always put negative interrogatives, when people are speaking, with do support but never using contractions e.g., "Do not you agree, Mr Darcy?"
Was that because it was not commonly used then, or not by "those classes", or just that it was not put in printed books?
That's an excellent question! My understanding is that contractions formed from "not" have probably been around for 300–400 years, but seem to have been considered colloquial — you don't tend to see them in writing regularly (dialogue aside) until the 20th century.
Ohh kinda like how we don't see "gonna" and "wanna" in writing?
I would like to say that "I think not", but in truth, "I know not".
Shakespeare sounds quite different and less accessible than other writings from around the same period like the King James Bible, Diary of Sam Pepys, etc. Is it because it is more idiomatic?
My guess would be that it's a combination of factors. One is that Shakespeare uses a lot of wordplay which often relies on pronunciations that are no longer obvious to us. Another factor is that we're often reading Shakespeare on a page as opposed to seeing and hearing it performed by actors who understand it well, so something is lost there.
Speaking of the King James Bible - I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian church where the KJV was considered to be the only divinely ordained translation. Preachers freely used Thee and Thou in their own prayers from the pulpit, and the general impression was that it was a heightened form of respect. Though I've long since left behind the religion, I experienced cognitive dissonance when I learned that these are actually the familiar, less honorific forms!
I don't suppose you know why the KJV translators chose to refer to their God in such familiar, intimate terms? (I assume they didn't intend to imply contempt.)
The Lord’s prayer in Spanish and French similarly use the familiar version of “your” in the translation of things like “hallowed by thy name. They kingdom come..” I suspect this is because there is an emotional charge to the relationship between oneself and God.
Do you refer to your father familiarly or formally? Based on Mr. Gorrie's article above, we Christians are encouraged to become familiar with God as Father and Jesus as Brother.
True, but speaking for myself, I did not take this literally
One of the great advantages of growing up in the north of England is that every school child already could understand this Shakespearean syntax. It was (and often still is) very common to say 'hast thou' or 'doest thou' even though they are now pronounced 'hasta' and 'dusta'. As an example, in the song 'Ilkley Moor' we get the line 'weer hasta bin sin Ah saw thee?'
Beautiful!!
Having moved all of 60 miles from the Black Country to north Derbyshire some time back, I am still amazed at the differences between our respective dialects. Over time one accommodates as they say, but just the other day I spoke to a lady from the local council who correctly identified my Heimat because I pronounced 'bus' as 'buz'.
Still, it would be interesting to compare levels of comprehension of Shakespeare in different regions of the world; English speaking and otherwise. I suspect we might find the results universally depressing.
I was born and grew up in Chapel-en-le-frith, and in my youth people would say that they could identify where someone was from to within six miles by their speech. Whilst this may no longer be true, I’m sure that ,but, is definitely a give-away!
Same in the Black Country. I suspect it's a remnant of the pre-industrial times when the various villages spoke distinct variations of regional dialects; comprehensible to their immediate neighbours but decreasingly so to those more than a few miles away.
I'm also reminded of the opening scene of Pygmalion where the linguist 'Enry 'Iggins claims he can identify the very street where someone was born.
I learned this from going to church, where our Book of Common Prayer sounded very much like the King James Bible.
I have a question: why do you put an apostrophe in thou's and thee's to indicate plural, as in "fond memories of those high school years poring over thou’s and thee’s?"
I don't really like the convention of using the apostrophe in those cases, but it seems to help readability, especially online, when it's not always clear I'm mentioning the word rather than using it.
I was just thinking about the King James Bible as well. The Church of England use a modern rendition of the Lord's Prayer, but I still have the King James version in my head because learnt it when I was three. "Leadeth us not" etc!
Our new prayer book uses modern verbiage for everything but the Lord’s Prayer, which it gives in both versions. My church (Episcopal, same as yours) prefers the old one.
A question on the present tense: Did they use verb inversion for that purpose? Would they have asked "What readest you/thou?" And I assume the proper answer would be "I read this blog post by Colin Gorrie."
Precisely! That's exactly how the older system worked: present tense for present action, and inversion to form questions.
It helps to write in Elizabethan English if you dabble in the telling of ancient stories as it sounds more authentic rather than if written in modern English. The difficulty is to find a balance. Sometimes one can overdo it and risk making mistakes, or under do it and sound too modern. Very useful article. I needed to save some content as reference. I copied some passages onto my notes. Sorry about that. Thanks.
Be my guest! I'm glad you've found it useful.
Fascinating! I had never heard of “to thou”. But there is a direct parallel in French, *tutoyer*. “On peut tutoyer?” May I use tu (rather than the formal *vous*)?
Very interesting about do-support. You mention that it first came into usage in the 14th c. John McWhorter wrote a book about Celtic influence on English, and he asserts that the “do” particle came into English from the Celtic languages. In Irish, for instance, a question in the present and future tense and sometimes in the past tense is always formed with the particle “an”. Inversion is not possible; Irish is VSO anyway, and the reverse would be unintelligible regardless of tense. Welsh and Cumbric operate in a similar manner, as I understand it. I forget how I felt about the strength of his argument, but if he’s right could it have taken until the 14th century to penetrate the English language?
I love ( I am loving) Osweald Bera, by the way. Absolutely seamless way of coming to terms with old English. It comes very close to the Nature Method, which in my opinion a superior way to learn— my dream is to write such a book for Irish :-)
Go raibh maith agat! I actually wrote about McWhorter's do-support hypothesis in more depth last month, if you're curious: https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/the-celtic-roots-of-english
You're right to point out that the late timing of the emergence of do-support is the major issue with this kind of theory. Proponents of the Celtic hypothesis do have explanations for it, but I'd say that they haven't managed to win over the doubters (yet).
If you write such a book for Irish, I'll be the first in line to buy it!
Yes, 'thouing' and 'tutoyer' are very similar, especially because 'tu' is reserved for family, close friends, children, animals and the Almighty. In the Raleigh example, 'thou' is disrespectful, but only 'thou' will do for God. This always amuses me.
Another oddity is that 'thou' slowly fizzled out (although 'tha' is still used in Yorkshire), while French seems to be going the other way: in online chats and youtube videos, perfect strangers address each other as 'tu' all the time, and if I had to place a bet on it, I think 'vous' is the form more likely to fizzle out.
I wish I knew some Irish (I'm originally from England but I live in Ireland). I do love the coincidences, such as the way you can insert 'mile' into 'go raibh maith agat' and in Italian it's 'grazie mille'. In Britain, if you say 'thanks a million', people will think you're being sarcastic.
Anyway, I think someone should start an Elizabethan website called Thou Tube. I'd be up for that.
> So much social weight did thou have at the time that it could even be used as a verb, as in to thou someone, meaning ‘to use thou when addressing someone.’
Similar in Russian, including modern Russian: тыкать — to use singular ты. "Не тыкай тут мне!" = pretty much "don't you thou at me!"
Really makes you feel the weight of what English has lost!
Fascinating! And, I can't help thinking that if I had learned this stuff in high school I would have been wickedly running around thou-ing my peers 😎
Now I'm imagining a scene with a student staying after class writing "I will not thou my classmates" 100 times over on the blackboard...
Ha!
Where does 'ye' fit in? Not as in 'ye olde' where we know it's really 'the'. But as in 'hear ye!'. Is it just an alternative spelling of 'you'?
Also: tenses in English are mad. You might say 'I am -ing' for something you're doing right then 'I am trying to sleep!'. But more often it indicates either something which is specifically ongoing, but probably not at the exact present time 'I am learning the piano'. Or it indicates the near future: someone who says 'I am going to France' is more likely to be making preparations than actually on the way.
WJC is right! "Ye," as in "hear ye", is the subject (nominative) form of "you." Eventually the two forms got confused and people started using the object (accusative) form "you' for both subjects and objects.
And you're right: English verb tenses are absolutely wild.
Ic do þe þancas, (Colin) bera!
I imagine that it is descended from Old English 2nd pers plur nominative "ge". Anyone reading that can confirm, or deny?
PS, generally pronounced about like "yee"
“Ye” is still used in Hiberno- English for you plural. As for the structure, there’s a parallel in Shakespeare’s Flewellen saying “Look, you”. That’s a guess on my part :)
Ye seems to take on a sense of formality in John McRae’s “In Flanders Fields,” “If ye break faith with us who die.”
I was taught by Irish sisters in grammar school who loved to point out odd (to us American kids) words. One I remember is "amn't" for "am not." And, of course, "'tis" for "it is."
Another excellent post which has sent my brain whirring!
I had no idea about the difference between thou and you (and to think that Sir Edmund is my (distant) cousin too, unleashing that badass thouing! That's fascinating and I wish I'd known that when I was studying Shakespeare.
It's so interesting how language from that period is intelligible (or seems to be) but there's comprehension slip-ups along the way.
Oh! And... When I was eleven, I went to Kentwell Hall in Suffolk. They pick a year in the Elizabethan or Stuart period and everyone there dresses, speaks etc as if it's that year. We were given a sheet of phrases, like a tourist given a phrasebook to go abroad. I tried very hard to learn it, but every time I tried to talk to the historic residents, I kept talking in French! It's really odd, but I wonder if Elizabethan English retained more Norman French, so that my brain went for the folder marked "French", instead of "English"?
how funny, i have had conversations with people explaining that 'yous' is incurrent, when all along it was 'you' in the singular that was incorrect
Further thought on do-support.
There is another linguistic oddity, appearing in Yorkshire as 'yan, tan, tethera', as a set of sheep-counting numbers. An article in British Archaeology a long time ago found these sheep-counting numbers, which are clearly related to Welsh, Cornish or Cumbric, to be quite widespread in England. Some think they relate to widespread continuing Brittonic speaking. I suspect, as they are specifically related to sheep-counting, they more likely relate to Welsh-speaking shepherds recruited at the time post Black Death when many English villages were cleared for sheep. People said 'sheep doth eat up men'.
If they spoke Welsh to their sheep (and presumably dogs), they would have spoken Wenglish - English as spoken in Wales has more Welsh grammar than standard - and so, in the late mediaeval period, there may have been these influences coming from sufficiently low status people, but not in polite written English.
If people found the do-construct useful, it may have spread.
Are the am-constructs similar or are they more widely spread in Germanic languages?
What I can't believe is that I did 5 years of Shakespeare in secondary school without anyone ever explaining this to me. Mind you, I also did 5 years of French and no one explained "tu" vs. "vous" either.
Some languages adopted an indirect style of address as the polite you. German still has singular and plural familiar (ich und ihr) but uses Sie (they) for formal in both numbers. Spanish has usted/ustedes for the formal, shortened from Vuestra Merced, also a third-person form.
I wonder if They will become the new formal type in English?