Having just written my first novel, in which Richard III visits the 21st century, I needed to let the reader see a contrast between him and modern people, partly in the way he spoke. I quickly found that this wasn’t as easy as I’d thought, so my Richard has a great facility for languages and soon learns to speak in modern parlance! However, I did have to use ‘Mediaeval speak’ for a few chapters and I came across a few snags.
For example, the words ‘hath’ and ‘hast’ and other verbs – do you put ‘-eth’ on the end or ‘-est’? I was fairly confident about my title (Richard Liveth Yet) as it was a quotation, so that must have been right. But some of my Mediaeval sentences didn’t flow so well and I wasn’t sure how correct they were.
And what about ‘Ye’, ‘you’, ‘thee’ and ‘thou’?
After doing some research, I found a few web pages that address these problems. I’m sure some of you, maybe all of you, already know this, but I didn’t – at least not all this information, so here goes:
‘Thou’ and ‘thee’ were the subject and object forms respectively for the second person singular pronouns where ‘ye’ and ‘you’ were the plural forms. ‘Ye’ was later dropped completely, and ‘you’, also used as a polite form for the second person singular, eventually replaced ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ too.
But from 1470 – 1650 or thereabouts, ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ were the Mediaeval equivalent of the French ‘tu’ and ‘toi’ – i.e. not only signifying the singular form, but also a more familiar or less respectful form of address.
Along with ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ came the possessive forms ‘thine’ and ‘thy’, used in the same way for the second person as ‘mine’ and ‘my’ were (and still are) for the first person singular. In addition, ‘thine’ was used before a vowel or a non-voiced ‘h’. (E.g. thine orange, thine honour, thy wife).
Not only that, but thee and thou had their own endings for present tense verbs: -(s)t (e.g. thou hast, thou lovest, thou shalt). And the third person singular also had its own ending in –th (e.g. he giveth, she loveth, it goeth, etc)
Hence ‘Richard liveth yet’, but ‘thou livest yet’. I’d better get on and do some editing!
If you want to see a couple of useful tables regarding this, click here.
murreyandblue 
I remember coming across all this in the Bible. None of this updated modern English stuff in my childhood. Thou hadst thy verses to learn! (I hope that’s right!)
But a fascinating article jrlarner. Thank you.
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Reblogged this on My Writing Blog.
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Interesting. I like reading a blog from the actual Ricardian novelist.
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Well, this all looks pretty simple – English pronouns and conjugation were at this point still more similar to other European languages. “Thou hast” sounds very similar to the German “du hast” (and the conjugation of singular forms are very similar: “ich habe, du hast, er/sie hat”). The history of English language since Old English is a history of its grammar becoming more and more simplified and the language losing most of its inflections. But the lack of separate forms for singular and plural second person pronoun is something that is really unusual – I don’t know if there is any other language in the world where this is the case? (It’s certainly something that gives headaches to translators of fictional works, who often have to use context clues or just take their best guess as to whether two people are addressing each other in a formal or in a familiar manner, if there are no specific terms that would make that clear, like Sir/Madam/Mr. Jones/Captain/Professor or Richie/Jane/Jones/buddy/hey, girl). On the other hand, using a plural form for polite/formal speech is nothing unusual for European languages, but it’s really astonishing that the polite/formal form came to completely replace the informal/familiar one. I’m trying to imagine people using formal terms of address to their children, siblings, lovers, old friends… and I can’t wrap my head around it.
I guess it would be more tricky at first to get used to Richard’s accent and pronunciation, and vice versa. Plus, obviously, he would be confused by new words and concepts that did not exist, but there would also be misunderstandings due to the changes in the meanings of some words. Reading Shakespeare, whose English is about a century younger, one can easily understand the text, especially the prose parts where people speak the everyday language – but a lot of the nuance and many of the puns are lost because of the changes in the meanings of some words. What do you think of the attempts by the University of Leicester to reconstruct Richard’s accent/speech?
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Yes, interesting points. I don’t speak German, but I do know French and Norwegian, which both have polite and familiar terms for ‘you’, though the Norwegian is changing now and losing the formal term (except if speaking to the royal family and suchlike!)
WRT the novel, I couldn’t make his speech too incomprehensible as I wanted to get into the story and that was more important than accuracy of speech and meanings, etc. I mention this in the Author’s Notes. Apart from which, the reader would not have understood him, as you say.
As regards the formal use of ‘you’, certainly in later times (e.g. Jane Austen’s novels) wives called their husband Mr Whatever, didn’t they, at least in public and children called their father ‘Sir’. Maybe the English are just over formal and strait laced!
I’m not sure about the speech expert. The theory sounds good but whether it is provable or just conjecture, I don’t know.
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Modern people, even if monolingual, are used to a wide variety of accents. We might have to ask a visitor from the 15-16th centuries to slow down or repeat himself, but we would get it eventually. The difficulty would be the other way. Richard & his contemporaries would probably think we were speaking another language. Giving him an unusual facility at picking up language is a good compromise.
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Yes, it’s a hard life being a novelist 😉
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For a different take, read Thomas Kenneally’s brilliant and exciting medieval-based novel “Blood Red, Sister Rose” about the military career of Joan of Arc. He uses modern, slang dialogue for all the characters and it works wonderfully well. Why he chose to write it that way, I have no idea (unless because the characters are all army people) but it is a guide to dialogue from another direction.
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Thanks Maire, I’ll add it to the ‘to read’ pile!
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