Is there a guide to write dialogue in old english style?

Hey, everyone, I want to write in ye old English style for a character. Google isn’t helping as it just shows me guides to be super accurate.

I just want to make it belivable without being a scholar. I wonder if there is a guide for stuff like thee and thou and the like. I just want a character to feel is speaking in old English.

Thank you!

Read Shakespeare

The basics are thee/thou/thy/thine are informal (which is surprising to those who read the King James Bible with its thee-ing and thou-ing to the central deity - some assume that they are the formal terms, but they're not) while you/you/your/yours are formal or plural - just like German, French and others that have an informal mode of address and a formal/plural mode.

The "fun" comes with conjugations - I have, thou hast, he/she has, we have, you have, they have for 1st, 2nd, 3rd person informal and 1st, 2nd, 3rd person plural/formal.

And the correct terms for different tenses can get really messy - as to when to use 'thou shall' vs 'thou shalt', for example.

'thine' is like 'mine' and used accordingly when talking to an equal you know well or an inferior, 'yours' is used when talking to a superior or someone of similar class whom you don't know or a group of people.

However, it's near impossible to get it straight unless you do become somewhat of a scholar of it and reading lots of written material from the era you're trying to evoke will help - plays and novels, for preference, as they depict how it is spoken better than formal writing does.

You would also be well-suited to study the archaic verb conjugations for 2nd person informal and formal/plural for all tenses - throwing in a 'shalt' just because you've used 'thou' can be wrong.

Here's one article on archaic grammar: https://www.swantower.com/essays/craft/archaic-grammar/

There's more to their speech than just thee-ing and thou-ing, however. Words meant different things at different times and there are words that have fallen into disuse over time that would have been commonly used and understood.

Before you put any word in a sentence, it might pay to run it through this https://www.etymonline.com to see when the word took on the meaning you want to avoid jarring modernism or completely different meanings than you intended - saying something was 'awful' back when thee/thou were current words did not denote that it was unpleasant.

Hey that helps a lot. Thank you very much.

Shakespeare is good, but you could also read Tolkien for 'archaic' sounding dialogue without too many thees and thous.

Another site: https://dan.tobias.name/frivolity/archaic-grammar.html

The characters in my WiP hearken from different eras 1700s, 1800s, various points through the 1900s and early to late 2000s. You can imagine how much research it takes to get their speech right. There's also scope that they could encounter people who speak English as they did in Shakespeare's time.

I've read Daniel Defoe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and others to get the feel for language use in the eras they wrote and I use that etymology site and Google search to check origins and original meanings of words. The etymology site will surprise you as to what really common well known phrases are actually extremely young and which slangy modern-sounding off-hand terms would have been perfectly understood by anyone in Daniel Defoe's England.

Some words, like 'nice', have really had a number done on them over the years, ending up passing through so many meanings that you'd practically best mark them on a decent calendar if you want to keep them straight and use them accurately.

Here on TV Tropes there are useful notes, especially under the Get Thee to a Nunnery and Have a Gay Old Time as to how words were used and have since changed.

Yeah, "nice" used to mean "silly or foolish" in its original denotation.

From etymonline:

Late 13c., "foolish, stupid, senseless," from Old French nice (12c.) "careless, clumsy; weak; poor, needy; simple, stupid, silly, foolish," from Latin nescius "ignorant, unaware," literally "not-knowing," from ne- "not" (from PIE root *ne- "not") + stem of scire "to know" (see science). "The sense development has been extraordinary, even for an adj." [Weekley] — from "timid" (pre-1300); to "fussy, fastidious" (late 14c.); to "dainty, delicate" (c. 1400); to "precise, careful" (1500s, preserved in such terms as a nice distinction and nice and early); to "agreeable, delightful" (1769); to "kind, thoughtful" (1830).

That's a lot of work for four letters in only a few short centuries.

edited 18th Mar '18 10:12:34 AM by Wolf1066