Real imitation Old Modern English

Just in time for the NFL playoffs, GEICO ran an ad based on the gag that there is, in fact, an "oldest trick in the book".  The trick?  Two sort of Medieval/Renaissance-looking guys are sitting in some sort of library/scriptorium-looking place.  Quoth the elder, pointing: "Looketh over there!", and when the younger does, "Haha!  Madeth thou look!"

OK, it's a GEICO commercial, not King Lear.  We don't expect linguistic accuracy.   We expect them to get the gag over, which they do just fine, by pasting -eth onto every verb in sight.  Old-looking costumes, old-sounding language ... got it.  Now back to the game in progress.  As the voice-over says "So endeth the trick."

Ironically, that last line is actually proper Elizabethan English.

Before I get back to the whatever larger point I may have, and largely because I just can't help myself, here's a brief rundown of the history of English.  If you're ever having too much fun at a party and would like to recast yourself as a fun-puncturing pedant and so be left in peace, take careful note.

English is generally divided into three forms

• Old English, spoken from somewhere around the 400s to somewhere around the 1100s.  It's basically a Germanic dialect, and if you weren't familiar with it you likely wouldn't think of it as English at all.  It sounds more like German or Icelandic and has a grammar more similar to classical Latin, with gender and case distinctions and other inflections all over the place, than English as we know it.  The best-known Old English work, Beowulf, doesn't even take place in England, but in what is now Scandinavia.  It looks like this, and starts off "Hwæt! Wē Gār‐Dena in geār‐dagum þēod‐cyninga þrym gefrūnon, hū þā æðelingas ellen fremedon" (except without the modern niceties like punctuation). This, of course, means, in Seamus Heaney's fairly loose translation, "So.  The Spear-Danes in days gone by, and the kings who ruled them, had courage and greatness."  (to be fair, English of that period can also look a bit more familiar, like this)
• Middle English, spoken from somewhere around the 1100s to the 1400s.  It looks a lot more like English as we know it (to be fair, it can also look like this), but still has some grammatical differences.  For example, I sleep, They sleep and I have slept become I slepe, They slepen and I have yslept.  More noticeably, Middle English was pronounced much differently from Modern English, not having been through the Great Vowel Shift.  Before then, English vowels had approximately the same values as in many other European languages, so the phrases above would be pronounced more like Ee slaypeh, Thay slaypen and Ee hahv eeslept.  Note that the silent e at the end of words isn't silent (or at least not always).  Middle English uses -eth as a verb ending where we would use -s, so she singeth instead of she sings, and it uses thou with -est as a verb ending, so thou comest instead of you come (see this post for a lot more on thou and you).   The best-known work of Middle English, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, looks like this and starts off "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / the droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote ...".  If you heard it recited, you might not catch much, but in print you might well believe it meant "When April, with its sweet showers, has pierced March's drought to the root ..."
• Modern English, which includes the Early Modern English of Shakespeare's Elizabethan times, spoken from the 1400s or so to the present.  Naturally the language has changed a bit over the past few centuries, but older forms such as Elizabethan English seem like our English with a few odd changes, not like a different language.  Apart from vocabulary, the most noticeable changes to our ears are probably that Early Modern English still uses thou and endings like -eth and -est.

There's a lot more to it, of course, but that seems more than enough for now.

Well, actually ... while I'm still in full-on killjoy mode: The actual rules of thou, -eth and -est are really not that hard:

• Use thou for the subject and thee for the object (but again, see the other post for details):  Thou art tall;  I bid thee good night.
• Put -est on the end of the verb if thou is the subject, with a couple of special cases like art for are and hast for have:  Thou knowest not what thou sayest.
• Change -s on the end of verbs (and only verbs) to -eth: The ice man cometh; So endeth the trick.

That covereth not all the bases, of course, but it will give thee reasonably accurate "old-sounding" English without too much trouble.  For the GEICO ad, we get "Look over there!" and "Made thee look", though perhaps "Look thou yonder!" and "I made thee to look" might be more likely.  I would suspect that the first version, at least, just doesn't sound "old enough" to pass muster for the ad.

Now that I've got that out of my system, what was my actual topic?  Ah yes.  It's not surprising or particularly interesting that modern speakers would get Elizabethan English wrong.  Why wouldn't we?  We don't speak it, and we only hear or read it on special occasions.  The more interesting question is how we get it wrong.  How is it that we come up with the particular pastiche of Elizabethan English that we do?

At a guess, since -eth and -est sound more or less alike and seem to be attached to a lot of verbs, it's not hard to boil real Elizabethan usage down to "use thou a lot and put -eth at the end of verbs" and even to "use thou a lot and put -eth on the end of a lot of random words."

That's so straightforward and obvious that it's easy to forget that there are plenty of other minor differences between our English and Elizabethan English that we don't tend to imitate.  Here and elsewhere, I'll take "our English" to mean "English as spoken by newscasters in major US outlets" or such.  Even in this day and age there is significant variation among dialects.  Please don't take it amiss if I say "We don't say ___" when you've heard people around you say just that -- but do feel free to leave a comment.

I've taken the examples below from Much Ado About Nothing partly because it's reasonably representative, but mostly because it's so much fun to read.

• The vocabulary has changed noticeably.  For example, we no longer distinguish whither (to where) and whence (from where) from plain where.  We may still recognize words like yonder and betwixt, but we don't tend to use them.  Some words, like meet (suitable, fit) or an (if) have meanings we no longer use, and some, like baldrick or fardel are entirely unfamiliar.
• Elizabethan English uses word orders and constructions that sound odd to our ears.  Here's a nice illustration:
  Because I will not do them the wrong to mistrust any, I will do myself the right to trust none; and the fine is, for the which I may go the finer, I will live a bachelor.
  Every word there is a perfectly familiar contemporary English word, but the way they're strung together makes me feel a bit like I just got off a ship and haven't got my land legs yet. Your mileage may vary.
• Cultural references have shifted, understandably.  Shakespeare's works, and other literary works of the time, are full of classical allusions that his audience would have had no trouble with, but are as opaque to us as a modern pop-culture reference would have been to Shakespeare (though I suspect he would have been a quick study). Things like or do you play the flouting Jack, to tell us Cupid is a good hare-finder and Vulcan a rare carpenter?
• Re-reading the opening of Much Ado, I found that large chunks of it flow almost like today's English, without major twistiness like the speech above, but with lots of little idioms that are just a bit different: he wears his faith but as [like] the fashion of his hat ...Don Pedro is approached [here] ...I wonder [am surprised] that you will still be [are still] talking, Signior Benedick: nobody marks [notices] you ...I would [wish] I could find in my heart that I had not [didn't have] a hard heart.

What we have here, as one might expect, is several layers of changes, none of them very big by themselves, but taken together enough to produce something that's clearly still English, but a significantly different kind of English.

When we try to imitate this language, there are a couple of major constraints:  It can't be too hard to come up with, and it can't be too hard to understand, but it does have to sound more or less like the examples we've heard.  We need a superficial imitation, while a realistic one would just get in the way.  I think that explains why we don't see obsolete words, strange word orders or classical references in the usual "Olde Englissh", but we do see features like thou and -eth.  Since we're going for impression, not accuracy, it's not so important exactly how we apply those features, just that they're there.

On this theory, the little idiomatic changes like I had not or is approached might find their way into a more careful imitation, at least more easily than the other items on the list above.  I can't be bothered to find evidence for or against that idea, but hey, it seems plausible enough.