Ye knowe eek^note, that in forme of speche is chaunge^note

With-inne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho

That hadden prys^note, now wonder^note nyce^note and straunge^note

Us thinketh hem^note; and yet they spake^note hem so,

And spedde^note as wel in love as men now do;

Eek for to winne love in sondry^note ages,

In sondry londes^note, sondry been usages.^note

—Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, Book II (roughly, "You know that language changes over a thousand years, and words that were then in use now seem strange to us; but they really did talk that way, and they spoke as eloquently about love as anyone did in any age or country.")

TV writers often have an odd idea of what "old-fashioned" English sounds like. Generally, they seem to think, it sounds vaguely like Shakespeare or the King James Bible, with plenty of "thee"s and "thou"s and verbs ending in "-est" or "-eth"; this results in the bizarre fake language Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe, a bastardization of modern English grammar and vocabulary, with archaic terms sprinkled throughout. Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe is occasionally even dignified with the name "Old English"; this, naturally, is quyte wronge.

Old English

Actual Old English, which developed after the Angles, Saxons and Jutes settled in England at about the 5th century, was spoken until the early Middle Ages. It is the earliest form of the English language, and provided the base to English's grammar, vocabulary and phonology. A West Germanic language, it is closely related to Modern Frisian, Dutch and, to a lesser extent, German. Along with its native West-Germanic vocabulary, it has a few Celtic loanwords, and obtained substantial influence from Old Norse in the tenth and eleventh centuries. It goes to show how much English has changed, with features such as noun declensions that modern English doesn't have. As an example, the first two lines of a 7th century poem called "C�dmon's Hymn" are:

Nu scilun herga hefenric�s uard

metud�s mehti and his modgithanc

People who wish to hear what Old English sounded like can watch the DVD of Benjamin Bagby's recitation of Beowulf; it's available on Netflix. Michael Drout has also made recordings of all surviving Old English poetry available free at his site

. The excellent Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf is printed in Old English and modern English on facing pages.

The Old English alphabet contains a few letters that didn't survive into modern times: �, thorn; �, eth; ȝ, yogh; and ƿ, wynn. The first two represent the "th" sound (as in "thin" and "then" respectively, although they are mostly used interchangeably in manuscript spellings); yogh, hard and soft "g"; and wynn, "w". (Thorn and eth are still used in modern-day Icelandic for more or less the same sounds as in Old English.)

Old English literature makes extensive use of the kenning, a poetic allusion—such as referring to the ocean as the "whale-road"—that was often standardized into cliche^note; and the litotes, a form of understatement, which Old English speakers were not unlikely to use.

Though Old English words make up a relatively small fraction of modern English vocabulary, they do include many of most commonly used words.

For more about Old English, go here

Middle English

XXIII. For to make Tartys in Applis. Tak gode Applys and gode Spycis and Figys and reyſons and Perys and wan they are wel ybrayed co-lourd wyth Safron wel and do yt in a cofyn and do yt forth to bake wel.^note

- Master Cooks of King Richard II, The Forme of Cury (1390)

To one island full of Old English speakers, add one Norman invasion, stir thoroughly to mix, and let settle. The resulting mix is Middle English, heavily influenced by the French- and Latin-speaking ruling class that existed after 1066. Middle English, spoken from the Middle Ages through a few decades before Shakespeare's day, is usually considered to be more understandable for a speaker of modern English (though your mileage may vary.) For example, Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales begins with the lines:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures sote

The droughte of March hath perced to the roote

Modern English is so standardised that countries as geographically far apart as the UK and Australia can sell each other entertainment, but Middle English was not: it was so variable from place to place and between generations that many words were not understood outside the immediate area of their origin. Hence Caxton's tale of a traveller unable to make a woman in London understand his meaning when he asked her for some eggs

: "And the goode wyf answerde, that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry, for he also coude speke no frenshe, but wolde have hadde egges, and she understode hym not." The reason? What he called "egges," she called "eyren."

The process of language mixing was here so variable and untidy that there is no definitive standard to which Middle English may be held. Mercifully, from a historical linguistic perspective, people from this time actually wrote what they heard, in contrast to the etymological spellings of modern English. Those "extra" Es were generally appended only where they were actually pronounced. Thus, the word "egges" above is understood to be not one but two syllables.

Early Modern English

A few centuries and a major vowel shift later (long story short: While the spelling of words stayed the same as they had always been, their pronunciation changed drastically.), Shakespeare and his contemporaries spoke and wrote Early Modern English: mostly understandable to modern English speakers, though with archaic features. This is the language of the King James Bible.^{Side note} Pseudo-Early-Modern-English seems to be what writers of Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe are aiming for—grammar and vocabulary are modern, and some archaic features are sprinkled in for flavor, without real knowledge of what those features were.

Modern English

What you're reading right now (Not the band

As a written language, Modern English until only relatively recently (we're talking into the 1700's) did not have standardized spelling rules—the same word might be written differently within even the same sentence. This can be seen in any text of the time that has not been edited to make the spellings consistent. Many of the standards people are familiar with were not set until the first dictionaries were printed, and even a good number of those have morphed over time. This also accounts for various spelling differences between British English and some forms of American English (and, to a lesser extent, Canadian English), their orthography around different variant spellings of the same words.

Thou, thee, and you

Like many west Indo-European languages, English used to have both singular and plural modes of address: English "thou", like French "tu", Spanish "t�", and German "du" were all used when speaking to one person; while English "you", French "vous", Spanish "vosotros"^note, and German "Ihr" were used when speaking to more than one person. Unlike most of those, English has lost its singular mode ("thou") and now uses the plural mode ("you") exclusively.

The only English dialect still to use forms of "thee" and "thou" in everyday speech is Yorkshire English; and, to a lesser degree, the other dialects found Oop North. (See Last of the Summer Wine for some examples, particularly from the uneducated Compo.) In Yorkshire English the "thee" and "thou" are now "thi" and "tha", and there is also "thissen" (informal "yourself"). Here the original use of these terms is preserved, with "thi" and "tha" being used informally and "you" being used formally and respectfully. See All Creatures Great and Small for examples.

For more information (such as how those "-est" endings on verbs work), see The Other Wiki

Thee

Most languages have pronoun cases, and English is no exception. "Thee" is the objective case of the second person singular (used when it's the object of the sentence's action), while "thou" is the nominative case (used when it's the subject). "Thou":"thee"::"I":"me". "Thy", meanwhile, is the genitive (possessive) case. "Thou":"thy"::"I":"my". Now go forth, troper, and impress thy teachers.

In the "plain speech" of the Amish, "thee" has apparently become used the same way "you" is in surrounding "English" (non-Amish) communities, as both nominative and objective. Until today TheOtherWiki

blamed this on an old Oop North dialect, but the evidence is for parallel evolution with "English" contact. For a wider-ranging discussion, see George Fox, Prescriptivist

Thine/Mine/etc

Most people seem to think that in archaic speech, "mine" can be substituted where we would use "my". Actually, the rules for where to use which are much the same as the rules for using a versus an - "mine" before words starting with a vowel (or an h), "my" before ones with a consonant. So you have "mine eyes!", but also "my feet!" The same rules apply for thy/thine.

"Ye Olde Barne Shoppe" and other mutations that make the baby Chaucer cry

"Ye" is often used in the eponymous Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe to mean "the", being pronounced "yee"; this is a case of bad research, as this is in fact just a variant spelling of "the", where the thorn (see under Old English above) was gradually worn down into a similar-looking Y. Originally this was abbreviated with the E floating over the thorn, which is how umlauts evolved in European languages: see this Wiki image - [1]

◊. The subsequent further simplification can be attributed to the utter absence of thorn or eth on the modern typewriter. By the time computers proved capable of rectifying this shortcoming, the standard misconception had been thoroughly integrated into the chintzy subregions of popular culture.

This incorrect "ye" (=="the") should not be confused with the historical "ye", which is either the long dead subject form of you or else an alternate pronunciation of "you". "Ye" has now largely died out except in fake Piratical talk (e.g. "Be ye looking for treasure?"). Note that in some areas "ye" is also still informally used in the second person plural (e.g. "How are ye?" when referring to a familiar group). This should not be confused with the vowel in "you" reducing to a schwa, pronouncing it /jə/ - which can be indistinguishable from "ye".

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