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Bonus 70: Speakest Thou Ye Olde English? (Patreon)

Published:
2022-12-02 01:47:07
Imported:
2023-02
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Would your eminence care to join me at Ye Olde Tea Shoppe? When we want to evoke a vaguely historical context, people often reach for a pseudo-archaic, Oldey Timey version of English, one that involves thees and thous, fancy titles, and the inevitable Olde Tea Shoppe or Olde Englishe Pub. Oldey Timey English is strictly about vibe -- it's by no means the same as Actual Old English (learning to read Beowulf involves considerable study!). But the ingredients that go into this pseudo-archaic style make it a distinct linguistic genre of its own, one that we pick up informally from a variety of sources.  

In this bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about stylized Oldey Timey English! We talk about contexts in which pseudo-archaic forms get used, from Gretchen's recent experience with names and titles in a 1492 papal election roleplaying game, to how the language handbook of the Society of Creative Anachronism balances modern-day desires for gender-neutral language with creating historic-feeling titles, and a 1949 academic article cataloguing business names in the New York City phonebook that began with "ye". We also talk about how people go about learning to do pseudo-archaism in various languages, including the pronunciation of "ye" and jocular biblicalisms in French. (We wish we knew more examples of stylized pseudo-archaic forms in other languages, but they seem to draw on quite a high level of fluency -- please contribute others you know in the comments!) 

Announcements:
Thank you so much for helping us celebrate our 6th anniversary! We appreciated seeing you get lingthusiastic on social media and hearing about how you'd recommended to the show to other language fans. And we greatly appreciate your support here on Patreon!

There's still 15 more days left to take our first ever listener survey! This is your chance to tell us about what you’re enjoying about Lingthusiasm so far, and what else we could be doing in the future - and your chance to suggest topics! It’s open until December 15, 2022. And we couldn’t resist the opportunity to add a few linguistic experiments in there as well, which we’ll be sharing the results of next year. We might even write up a paper about the survey one day, so we have ethics board approval from La Trobe University for this survey. Take the survey here!

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

You can listen to this episode on this page, via the Patreon RSS or download the mp3. A transcript of this episode is available as a Google Doc. Lingthusiasm is also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com or chat to us on the Patreon page. Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic. Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

To chat about this episode and other lingthusiastic topics with your fellow linguistics fans, join us on the Lingthusiasm Discord server.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, and our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

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Comments

Anonymous

I love Ada Palmer so much and would love to hear you two chat with her! Maybe discuss how she came up with the terms in her books like ba'sib, etc and also how her work in history and anime crosses over to language stuff?

Anonymous
>>96760000

Also i feel like just in general your essay on future English would overlap well with her worldbuilding for Terra Ignota. I know her next series has Vikings in it, so maybe there's some languagy stuff there to discuss? Idk but i would just really love to see two of my nerdoms come together

Chekhov

One of my favorite examples of this type of anarchism is Brennan Lee Mulligan improvising a Shakespearean In-Flight Safety Video: https://youtu.be/nJmfsl6Or10

Anonymous

As a nerdy teenager I used to get so frustrated with people using "Ye Olde Englishe" with all the "wrong" grammar etc. It seems like it was mostly an attempt at Shakespearean English but people would get tripped up on where to use thee/thou/thine/thy etc and I always had to bite my tongue because I knew it was meant to be just for fun. I think I actually learned most of my "Olde Timey Englishe" from hymns in church, and now that I look back on those, I'm fairly sure a lot of them are anachronistic and doing exactly what people do now with trying to make their language sound fancier by using archaic words. If I had the time I'd love to go back through the old hymn books and work out how appropriate the language was for the actual time period it was written in.

Anonymous
>>96836838

Yes! I loved the book The Witch of Blackbird Pond in middle school but the misuse of Thee as a subject pronoun is grating to the ear. (I listened to the audiobook for a reread recently...)

Anonymous

As a Spanish teacher I can comment on the way Spanish and Portuguese future tenses arose. I imagine something similar occurred in French. The phenomenon is most obvious in Portuguese where the future tense verb ending starts with a vowel and can either be added to the infinitive form OR added to the direct object (the compound word for some direct plus indirect object phrases) as another syllable, which are both then appended to the infinitive form of the verb. Like so: dizerei (I will say) can be extended by the addition of a -te- infix, dizer-te-ei, too mean "I will say to you", or even dizer-to-ei, where the -to- infix is a combination of "to you" and "it", to mean "I will tell you it". Fascinating.

Anonymous
>>96843282

I can't do paragraph breaks on my phone apparently. Here's the connection to the podcast 🎉 --- We see the vestiges of the Spanish way of doing this in Don Quijote, where the protagonist often uses an archaic future tense which is a clear evolution of the verb Haber, an auxiliary verb that works like "has" in "has done" type phrases in English. For example, "He de buscar" would be "I must seek", but can also be used to indicate what I will do...because I must! Turns out that modern Portuguese has preserved this separation of syllables, and the funny future tense verbs actually come from a "have to do this" kind of phrasing. So the Ye Olde Commande Forme in French and so on looks like that for a very interesting little linguistic reason. Who'd'a'thunk? 🤷‍♂️

Anonymous

I was delighted to hear about the Society for Creative Anachronism. Although I now live in St. Paul, MN, in the early 80s neighbors in our apartment building in Chicago were a couple who were editors of Tournaments Illuminated. Their names, as well as I can remember, Friar Bertrand of Bearington and Eromine Aspasia of Constantinople. (I don't remember their 20th-century names.) Gretchen mentioned being locked into conclave. Fun fact which you probably know: Conclave derives from Latin "with key" so the cardinals were indeed locked in. Very interesting episode! PS. I am baffled as to how to get logged into Discord, so I have to post here.

Anonymous

Attorney (in USA) here. In the courtroom we refer to the judge as Your Honor, which I think is pretty well known. But it is also very common for that to extend to "your honor's" rather than a simple "you" when talking to the judge. And even when referring to the judge to a third person, very common to see a "her honor," if the judge is in earshot. E.g., "your honor is right that..." "well, what I think her honor was trying to ask..." Definitely feels like overkill but you get used to saying it. This episode made me think on that a lot!

Anonymous

An example of old timey French, "point" instead of "pas" (not) comes up a lot, as does the gratuitous use of the "passé simple" verb tense. Titles are a big one in French too, especially since the French Revolution did away with them.