Playing With / Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe

Basic Trope: Bad attempts at Early Modern English.

• Straight: In an episode of Crazy Time Travels, Alice and Bob Time Travel from the 2000s to the 1500s and meet Charles. Charles misuses "thou" and "thee" as second-person plural pronouns and sometimes uses wrong conjugations like "thou hath".
• Exaggerated: Charles uses "thine" as an all-around second-person pronoun. He also uses "thou" and "thee" as, respectively, first- and third-person pronouns, adds -eth and -est to pluralize nouns, spams -eth and -est on verbs regardless of tense, person, and number,^note Sometimes he puts both on the same verb for good measure, like "dodgedsteth." and always uses "mine" instead of "my".
• Downplayed: Charles makes some subtle mistakes like using "thou art" and "thou wast" when he should have used the subjunctive forms. He also uses some anachronisms.
• Justified: Charles' native language isn't English, and the mistakes mentioned in Straight aren't the only mistakes in his grammar.
• Inverted:
  • Alice and Bob travel to the 2500s. Since the 2000s, the English language has evolved in a highly improbable way.
  • The show tries to make Alice and Bob speak like modern teenagers. Half their dialogue is outdated slang.
• Subverted:
  • Crazy Time Travels is known for running on Rule of Fun and not bothering much with research. However, Charles' Early Modern English is grammatically correct.
  • Before approaching Charles for the first time, Alice insists that she do the talking. Bob, knowing that Alice is The Ditz, expects a terrible attempt at Early Modern English. However, Alice just speaks Modern English, and so does Charles.
• Double Subverted:
  • To Subverted #1:
    • After the first episode in which Alice and Bob visit the 1500s, the writers decide that writing correct Early Modern English is too much work and that 99% of the target audience won't notice whether it's correct anyway. In the next episode, Charles speaks Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe.
    • Charles speaks some lines of correct Early Modern English, but the writers plagiarized them from a different work. When they try to write on their own, they end up writing Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe.
  • To Subverted #2: After Alice and Bob are gone, Charles switches to his native Butcherede Englishe (see Straight).
• Parodied:
  • Charles speaks like described in Straight. Dina, who's also from the 1500s, calls him out for it and tells him to speak "properly", which means speaking Modern English.
  • Alice and Bob try to speak Early Modern English by merely taking a sentence in Modern English and adding -eth to everything. Charles calls them out and explains some differences between Early Modern English and Modern English.^note Charles picked up some Modern English grammar while listening to how Alice and Bob spoke to each other.
  • All the characters from the 1500s butcher their olde Englishe in different ways: Charles adds -eth to all verbs, Dina spams "thou" and "thee" regardless of number and case, Eric replaces every "my" and "thy" with "mine" and "thine", Frida uses "ye" instead of "the"...
  • The characters from the 1500s speak proper Early Modern English. Alice and Bob have to hide the fact that they're time travellers, but have no idea how archaic grammar works, so they just speak normal Modern English and add -eth to everything. The characters from the 1500s are fooled.
  • The following dialogue:
    Emperor Evulz: I hath poisonedest thou!
    Bob: It should be "I have poisoned thee" if you've only poisoned me, and "I have poisoned you" if you've poisoned Alice too. If you're going to use archaic English, at least do it correctly.
• Zig-Zagged: Depending on the Writer and situation, Charles either speaks good archaic English, bad archaic English or Modern English.
• Averted:
  • The characters from the 1500s speak well-researched Early Modern English.
  • The characters from the 1500s speak Modern English for some reason.
• Enforced:
  Writer: Here's the script for the episode that takes place in the 1500s.
  Meddling executives: Why do the characters from the 1500s speak the same way as Alice and Bob? It doesn't make any sense.
  Writer: But I don't know anything about how archaic grammar works.
  Meddling executives: You're writing for a kids' show. Just throw in some "thou"s and "thee"s in Charles' speech or something. Nobody will notice if you mess up.
• Lampshaded: "Thine grammar dost sucketh."
• Invoked: After learning that his attempts at Early Modern English are terrible, Bob deliberately misuses ancient words to induce groans.
• Exploited: Emperor Evulz speaks in Early Modern English to confuse whoever cannot translate it.
• Defied:
  • Alice and Bob research Early Modern English to avoid using it incorrectly when they time travel.
  • Alice and Bob don't try to use Early Modern English.
  • Alice and Bob go to a time and place where they know how to speak the language.
• Discussed:
  Charles: Dost thou see the time travellers?
  Dina: Yes. I hope they won't try to imitate our English. They always do it badly.
• Conversed: "'Thou ist mine best friends'? Did the writers seriously think that's correct archaic English?"
• Deconstructed: Alice accidentally insults and aggravates people when she tries to use "thou" as a polite form of address.
• Reconstructed: She apologizes for her mistake and some people from the "past" even admit they get it wrong sometimes, too.
• Plotted a Good Waste: The writers intentionally butcher Charles' archaic English to hint that he's actually a time traveller pretending to be from the 1500s.
• Played for Laughs:
  • All the adults speak Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe, all the kids use Totally Radical slang, and the teenagers use a mixture of them.
  • A work is set in the early 2000s. The characters who were born in 2000 or later talk normally. Everyone else won't stop talking Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe because "we're from the previous millennium; of course we talk like this."
  • Before approaching Charles for the first time, Alice insists that she do the talking. Bob, knowing that Alice is The Ditz, expects a terrible attempt at Flowery Elizabethan English. However, Alice speaks it fluently and pretty well. Bob thinks "If an idiot like her can speak it well, so can I." Cue Bob's botched attempt at Early Modern English.
  • Whenever Alice and Bob Time Travel to the past, be it five minutes or 100,000 years, they find people speaking Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe. Such also applies whether a large enough population of English-speakers had even visited the place they go or not.
• Played for Drama: Bob and Alice go hungry, thirsty, unsheltered, etc. in the 1500s because they can't communicate with anybody else properly and are restricted to Butcherede Englishe.
• Played for Horror: Bob reads from a page of prewritten Early Modern English, but he misreads it and ends up speaking Butcherede Englishe … which summons an Eldritch Abomination.
• Implied: Alice and Bob's trip back to the 1500s isn't shown, but upon their return, they say, "We got some funny looks when we tried to speak like we thought they did back then."

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Ol' discipline of the TV Tropes, thou hast journeyed far. Goeth backe to ye mayne payge.

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