Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Shakespeare's English

Starting point is 00:00:00 English is a very strange language. It's a Germanic language where half of the words actually come from a romance language. We have a host of words that make absolutely no sense in terms of spelling or pronunciation. But perhaps strangest of all, some of the greatest literary works in the English language are filled with words that don't even exist anymore. Learn more about the English of Shakespeare and how our language has evolved on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

Starting point is 00:00:50 It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the Thurline podcast from NPR. English is, in some ways, a very simple language. There are no gendered nouns like there are in German or Spanish. We have one simple indefinite article, The, and two definite articles with a, simple rule for when to use them, a and an Anne. English also doesn't have formal or informal words that you need to think about based on who you're talking to. In Japanese, for example, you may have to

Starting point is 00:01:27 use totally different words depending on if you're talking to a friend or if you're talking to your boss. And it can also change depending on if you're talking to someone older or younger. In French, there's a distinction between how you say the word you. If you're talking to someone close or a child, you would use the word too. And if you're talking to an adult or a stranger, would use the word vo. Napoleon Bonaparte once wrote an irate letter to Josephine because she used vo to him in a letter instead of two. German has kind of the same thing. There's a formal distinction between Z and do, and when it's okay to use do, can be an issue between people. English doesn't have any of this. It doesn't matter if you're talking to a president, a king, or a pauper. You call them all

Starting point is 00:02:10 you. While English eliminates many of these confusing elements from other languages, it didn't always ways used to be that way. In fact, you have probably encountered many of the vestiges of English in the form of the works of Shakespeare or older translations of the Bible. For example, if you ask most English speakers what the Sixth Commandment is, they will usually say, thou shalt not kill. While it's only four words long, two of those words, thou and shalt, are not used in common English. There are a host of words, including the pronouns, the, thou, thou, thine, and ye, which were all part of English centuries ago, and all have fixed grammatical functions. Let's start with the word thou. One problem with English is that we use the same word for the

Starting point is 00:02:59 second person plural and the second person singular. If I say, you are listening to this podcast, asked, you don't know if I'm referring to you, the person who's hearing my voice, or if I'm referring to everyone listening to my voice. This didn't used to be a problem in English. Thou is explicitly a first-person singular form of you. If I said thou, it would clarify that I was referring to you, the person, listening to this. However, there is more to it. You might have heard a Christian hymn titled, How Great Thou Art. Art in this sentence is actually a second-person singular form of the verb to be. So it would be, I am, thou art, you are, he she it, is. The word thou affects verbs beyond just the verb to be. In the Sixth Commandment example I gave above, shalt is the second-person singular version of shall. I shall, thou shalt.

Starting point is 00:04:01 In fact, for many verbs, they would often add an ending of ST or E. E-S-T if it was used in conjunction with thou. For example, you would say, thou walkest to the store. However, there's even more to it than that. In some languages, nouns might have totally different endings, making totally different words depending on if it is the object or subject in a sentence. This is why Latin is so confusing for people, because the ending of the word will be totally different depending on its place in the sentence.

Starting point is 00:04:31 In English, for the most part, we don't do that. However, we do do that for pronouns. For example, if I was to say, he threw the ball to her, that would be a perfectly fine sentence. But if I were to say, her through the ball to he, that just doesn't sound right. In grammar, these are called nomative and accusative cases. Nomitive words are the subject of a sentence, and these include I, he, she, it, and they, and back in the day, thou. Accusative pronouns would be me, him, she, them, and the accusative version of thou would be the.

Starting point is 00:05:13 Examples of thee and thou in a sentence could be, I threw the ball to thee. Thou threw us the ball to me. Now I'm going to make this just a bit more complicated. Today, if you hear the word thou, it kind of sounds fancy. In fact, thou was the informal version of you. You would use Thou when talking to friends, family, and people of the same social class. What was the formal version of Thou? Well, this is where it gets confusing.

Starting point is 00:05:43 It was you. You would address the King of England, for example, as you instead of thou. Finally, just to camp off discussion of thou, we have to address the possessive form, which is the word thine. This is used in the phrase, to thine own self be true, or I could say, thine car. is blocking my driveway. So just to summarize, in Shakespearean English, the second person singular would be thou, thee, and thine. Thou art a podcast listener. I record a podcast for thee. You listen to this podcast on thine smartphone. Okay, so what about the second person plural? This too is different. If you are using it as the subject of a sentence, aka the nomative form, you would use

Starting point is 00:06:32 the word ye. Ye is referring to a group of people that you are addressing. Examples you might have heard of include, Abandon Hope, All Ye who enter. Or, oh, ye of little faith. Here, I need to make things even more confusing, because back in Old English, before Shakespeare even, there was an additional letter in the English language called a thorn. The thorn symbol was pronounced the same as T-H. In old English, it was written as kind of an elongated lowercase P, but when the printing presses started, they didn't have that character. So they used a letter Y instead. So if you ever see a sign that says something like Ye old shop, this use of ye is not the second person plural, but rather, it's literally just the word the, so the sign would read the old shop. Are you

Starting point is 00:07:25 confused yet? Because I'm just getting started. The accusative form of ye, when used as the object of a sentence, is just the word that we're familiar with, you. The exact same word which was used in the formal version of the second person singular. The best example that uses both of these words comes from the King James Version of the Bible. Quote, and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. Ye is the subject, and you is the object. So if you're ever wondering how we ended up using the word you for both singular and plural, now you can kind of see why.

Starting point is 00:08:02 Having explained the confusion of the word you being both singular and plural, now I want to loop back to something I alluded to at the beginning of the episode. I mentioned the hymn titled How Great Thou Art. Thou, in this case, is referring to God. In fact, many of the early English Bibles, God is referred to using the word thou art. But as I mentioned, thou is the informal version, and you was the formal. Given that, you'd think that the English translations of the Bible would refer to God as you rather than thou. If this were the case, then how great thou art really should be how great you are.

Starting point is 00:08:43 So what's the deal with that? This is all due to one man, William Tyndale. Tyndale was one of the first people to translate the Bible into English. Because the word you had both a singular and plural meaning, he didn't want there to be any confusion. As a proper monotheist, he didn't want anyone to assume that you could be plural, implying that there were multiple gods. Therefore, he used thou because it was unambiguously singular,

Starting point is 00:09:12 even if it was informal. So at this point, I'm sure I've confused everyone. However, it isn't necessarily that complicated. To summarize, here are all of the first and second-person pronouns, singular and plural, as Shakespeare would have known it. I, me, mine, we, us, ours, thou, thee, thine, ye, you, y'er. So if thou wishest to read Shakespeare with a better understanding of what he was saying, then devote thy time to understanding the words of that period. understanding Shakespearean writing isn't that hard once you get the hang of the words that I've outlined here,

Starting point is 00:09:49 as well as the ST and EST ends to some of the verbs. But I will say that even though modern English is less precise, just using you for everything is much less confusing. Everything Everywhere Daily is an Airwave Media podcast. The executive producer is Darcy Adams. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. I just wanted to extend a big thank you to everyone who is supporting the show over at Patreon I have show merchandise available there, including hoodies, t-shirts, and stickers.

Starting point is 00:10:22 Plus, it really just helps me get this show out every single day, including, of course, weekends and holidays. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you too can have it read on the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Shakespeare's English

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