I have read Jane Austen, and such. Treasure island... and other such classics as this. In all of the olden books they write with things such as;
'Tis
'Twas
Even...
'Tain't
Not to mention speaking of fortnights, nowandays, and other such things that are not commonly said today. Along with thy, thou, and other things.
In your writing; do you use words like you normally speak? Or for some do you use older english translations to give it more of a literature-type feel? I like to use older words personally.

Edit: I have fixed the title to avoid confusion of the actual "Olde English" as a noun instead of using olde as the abjective and English as the noun!

I use what is basically modern English, though I don't have them saying "Dude", "Awesomeness", "Bodacious", or anything like that. I sometimes have a dwarf character say "Ye", "Laddie", or things along those lines, however. So, maybe a few "archaic" words here and there, but mostly "normal" English.
God bless,
Crushmaster.

*is amused that Austen is "Old English" now, puts Ivanhoe and Beowulf aside*

I use whatever manner of speech is suitable to the character and the region they hail from. Trevelian and Aren tend to have a far more formal way of speaking because they are from Old Lamar. I have several characters from here and now so they speak much as we do. There are characters that pick up on our speech from their visits here so they mix and match as they go. So yes, I would say I do use older English but I haven't actually used 'Tis yet...

I love old words.

BUT! I am not a fan of thees and thous.

I like to mingle my old with my new, which (I hope) gives an old flavor while making people seem real and vivid.

"Well, I suppose. Only pray don't make it long."

"I? Why, is there aught amiss?"

"I daresay I could dance you down any day!"

"Yonder is a player I agree with. No objection I trust?"

I just like to sprinkle words in there which might not be heard in a modern context.

I don't like to have my characters speak completely like they just got escaped from a Shakespeare play. But I do use many words that don't get much airing these days. All of them are still part of the language we speak today but they aren't used much.

(BTW Old English is not the term you're looking for is Middle English.)

It depends for me. My different characters speak differently, even if they are from the same village. I have some characters who sound like they just stepped out of a Jane Austen novel...and some who sound like they just got back from the South. (Haha, yes, I am Southern. )

Despite the character's dialogue, though, my narrator always speaks in a proper English style. Not necessarily archaic, but more sophisticated, I would suppose. Without using word contractions such as "don't" and "can't" and using more eye-catching words to describe things rather than words similar "big" and "ran"

*laughs * Since when is Jane Austen Old English?

I love it when a movie or a book has a really modern feel to character and speech, but still preserves that really dated texture--not so much in word order, but in word choice. With more eye-catching words, as Beth said. Words that seem to belong with swords and chivalry and small huts and bean pottage more than the laptop and microwave, while still retaining the casual-ness of conversation. I guess I'm just generally more careful with the dialogue word-choice in HF than I am in contemporary fiction.

Umm, pedant here (and I was sure someone else would have said this before now) ... Chaucer (died 1400) is Middle English. Shakespeare (born 1564), to say nothing of Austen (born 1775), Stevenson (born 1850), and every other author mentioned in this thread so far, is clearly Modern English. Modern English is dated as beginning somewhere between 1500 and 1550.

lol. Yeah. But we all know what was meant.

Yes and no. I like to use words that you don't hear everyday in the twenty-first century and that were more common before my time. However, words like, "thou," "thee," "thine," etc. I find more distracting, even if it does add more of a realistic style of speech to the story. So I don't really use them quite often, except in poems or songs within my story.

I wouldn't go as far as saying Jane Austin is old English but I do enjoy the little known and little used parts and aspects of the English language. In my books my characters would say words such as those as well as historical or artistic texts within the Dhomma and Elintil. I would not use these words often in terms of narration purposes. But I do love reading them.

All I meant by "old english" was all the thees thys and thous and such... I didn't know it was some other language thing!

What does he expect from holy worlder's?

Yes, old English is pretty much a complete different language than what we speak now. Middle English would be a little more accurate definition.

P.S. I am proud of being a grammar Nazi.

Hehe, I didn't mean it as in old english the name it'self, but rather the english in old, old being a modifier rather than the name it'self.



Hehe... I've had my share on the other side of the keyboard! I'm getting what I deserve. Teehee!

I know, I'm just giving you a hard time. And by the way, what is this?

*Offers you an embroidered favour to tie on your lance* My hero. I was about to concoct a similar timeline. Don't forget Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) or that Beowulf, truly "Olde English"/Anglo-Saxon, dates somewhere between the 8th and 11th centuries. Chaucer was a nice point, by the bye.

I often use antiquated language in real life. In my writing, I'm desperate to avoid purple prose and tend to tone it down. I've got one character at present who is a major Shakespeare fanatic and speaks mainly in quotations when possible, but that's about as far as I've gone with the thees and thous. I don't have a current project where Elizabethan-era dialogue would be appropriate, but if I end up with one I don't think I'll shy away from it, though it'll take a great deal of study to get it to flow right.

In Pamela Dean's Hidden Land trilogy, the inhabitants of the land "talk like Shakespeare" and the children from our world... don't. And yet the folk they're talking to don't notice that they're speaking differently than the dopplegangers they've replaced spoke all their lives previously. I loved the books, but found that awkward.

In Scones and Sensibility by Lindsay Eland, we get a chance to see what it might have been like if Anne Shirley's early life had been chronicled in first person rather than third - and while her overly-romanticized speech patterns were somewhat charming in dialogue, I learned that they could have waxed obnoxious fairly rapidly if they comprised the majority of the text. ~_^

Haha, I know that you're joking around and stuff... but if the editors want to fix something, they will! It's not too nice to degrade me about my spelling, thank you. I know I'm your brother, but that means that you should probably treat me a tad better rather than a tad worse I love you brother!

I was only joking. You didn't have to take it bad like that. I would have said the same to anyone else.

Teehee, I know you were joking, but I'm just saying.

Wait, y'all are brothers?

Has anyone here read Beowulf? It's on my to-read list but I'm hesitant simply because it was written so long ago I'm more comfortable with an Austen-era book or something.

eru

Beowulf is awesome! Defiantly worth reading. Though I would suggest getting a translation rather than reading it in old english

I haven't read it, but I plan on it.

Just like you and Caleb!

And real brothers at that. Not those brother from another mother type siblings you have here in holy worlds land where you are not even closely related (Which confuses me when I hear people call each other sister and brother when they have not even met in real life).

@Joe/Airi: I will definitely be checking it out I have an English translation, thanks Joe

@Namor/Aele: That's cool. Siblings are confusing on HW but there's a handy chart

eru

I beg your pardon, my siblings are my real siblings. I don't give the title out flippantly. If you are actually referred to as my siblings, there is a legitimate reason. There are people on the forum I am very close to, but they are not necessarily my siblings.

I did not mean you, Miss Airianna.

Sorry Lady E. You are absolutely right.

That's a good idea!
*Goes back on topic*

*wonders* What was the topic? *looks at title* Oh. *cough*

Asking people about the different voices and styles of their writings, in the way of newer to older vocabulary words. Do you use thy? Forsooth? Alas? And surely you wouldn't use things such as, gnarly, bodacious, and rocking? Though I sometimes use newer words in dialogue of fantasy in exocosmic books, but not ever in the actual writing of the book. Do y'all?

I don't use any of the old second-person-singular pronouns in my prose, and have never used "forsooth," "gnarly," or "bodacious" and can't imagine a context in which I'd want to use any of those. Were I to use "rocking", it would be in some context like "gently rocking", "rocking chair", or so forth. "Alas", on the other hand, is a word I don't use very much in my fiction, but I use it quite often in my speech in general and in my poetry, and I wouldn't hesitate to use it in my fiction if appropriate.

All this has (possibly) one exception. There's one digression (so to speak) that I'm planning to have my saga make to a previously-unknown planet, and I once had the idea to use how archaic the language people of that world speak to show how far they are from their capital. But doing that well would be quite difficult (particularly since I would need to make sure that everyone still spoke proper English for the equivalent time), so I probably won't go through with it.

As far as I'm concerned, consistency is key. My sister uses some words that I consider a bit modern (such as "okay"), but if they're introduced early enough in the story they're not so terribly jarring and don't break the mood. Different characters can have various speech patterns, use slang or archaic language to varying degrees - as long as that character doesn't change how they speak suddenly and without explanation.

I like to make my work as professional as possible and I think words such as those you described and those similar to it detract from the work and are unnecessary. There are certainly other words in the English language that fit a sentence better than "gnarly". I love words, so I like to use as many of them that I find interesting as much as I can.

'Gnarled'??

I believe he meant using the word "gnarly" in place of "awesome".

Using "gnarly" meaning twisted and knotted is an awesome adjective in my opinion.

*laughs* Oops! Never heard if it that way before. Must be American.



Same.

Nope ... or at least not American in general. I'm from Michigan, and the only place I've met "gnarly"---in any meaning, in any context---is the title to The Dragon and the Gnarly King, one of the last books in Gordon R. Dickson's The Dragon and the George series. While I haven't read that book, "gnarly" meaning "gnarled", "twisted", "knotted" makes sense there, and as a synonym for (the modern meaning of) "awesome" ... doesn't. (And would never have occurred to me, for that matter.)

I heard "gnarly" more commonly in the 80s, along with "radical," "rad," and the like, but more on television (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, in particular) than from people where I lived. Oh, the 80s and its sad, sad attempt to be cool...

*nods* Exactly.

Back to old English.....

Ah, yes, old English! 'Tis the thread title, after all.

So, is Beowulf written in true Old English? If so, it wouldn't be readable to us, right? Is Middle English readable to modern speakers?

eru

If Beowulf is written in anything that can be called English at all, it's Old English. But my understanding is that there wasn't any one language that was unarguably "English." And no, it's not readable without a great deal of help. (On the first day of my English Literature I class in college, the professor sprang a short Old English poem on us and had us try to come up with a translation; what we came up with was so far from the actual meaning it was funny.)

Much of the vocabulary is such that a reader going in "cold" needs an edition with "glosses" in the margins (i.e. that marks unfamiliar words in the text and provides a modern synonym in the margin), and you'll need to know or figure out how spelling and pronunciation have changed, but yes, it's eminently readable. For example, see this section of the Wikipedia article on the Canterbury Tales, which gives the text, the pronuncation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (which I have yet to meet anyone who can read), and a Modern English translation. Once you get going, it's hardly more difficult than any thick dialect would be today.

Yes Beowulf was written in true old english, like this:

"Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,"

But there are plenty of modern translations.

Old English is pretty much unreadable, although there are words that are the same.
(I'm taking a course on old English it is very fascinating.)

Middle English is much more readable:

"Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;"

Middle English is a lot closer than Old Still, I wouldn't mind trying to learn how to read it, just to say I can do it Interesting.

eru