Timeline for Can you correct this “old English” quote?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 14, 2022 at 13:17 | comment | added | Kef Schecter | @Bohemian That is not correct. Thou and you were always different words, which were þū and ēow in Old English (real Old English, not Early Modern). In Early Modern English, you was the accusative form of ye (Old English ġē), and both were pronounced with a y sound. You're probably thinking of how the article ye (as in "Ye Olde Shoppe", not to be confused with the aforementioned pronoun) is an old spelling of the. | |
| Jan 14, 2022 at 6:16 | comment | added | Bohemian | Back in Elizabethan times, "you" was how printers printed what we currently spell "thou", but was actually spelt with a thorn "þou", but they didn't have such a type set letter in their European printing set, so they picked the letter "y" which they deemed closest to thorn. The printers won the spelling battle. So, the correct pronunciation of "you" back then is "thou", because it's the same word. | |
| Jan 13, 2022 at 19:20 | comment | added | Dawood ibn Kareem | Wow, thank you @ColinFine - today I learnt. | |
| Jan 13, 2022 at 18:02 | comment | added | Colin Fine | @DawoodibnKareem: both are found. The OED say "(b) beest forms (2nd singular). 1500s–1600s beest, 1600s bee'st. Historically, these continue indicative forms, but apparently at least some early modern English texts prefer beest (rather than art) in syntactic environments that otherwise favour use of the subjunctive such as conditional clauses, as illustrated here. Similar use in conditional clauses is found later in south-western English regional varieties, but these also use beest regularly in the indicative." The examples given include Milton and Shakespeare | |
| Jan 13, 2022 at 15:14 | comment | added | fectin | And anything pithy from that time should have good scansion as well. To make it balance right, you likely need "thinkest" specifically ("thinkst" messes up the emphasis) and to insert another word: "When thou thinkest thou art done, thou art truly just begun." | |
| Jan 13, 2022 at 15:11 | comment | added | fectin | It's not wrong exactly, but you should likely use "to be" in both verbs: ...thou art just begun. | |
| Jan 13, 2022 at 13:31 | comment | added | Andy Bonner | "The fated sky gives us free scope, only doth backward pull our slow designs when we ourselves are dull" All's Well That Ends Well I.i.218 | |
| Jan 13, 2022 at 13:31 | comment | added | Andy Bonner | @DawoodibnKareem Actually I'd probably go for "When thou thinkest thyself done" myself, but I could also imagine authors tweaking the tense for the sake of meter as suggested elsewhere. I kept quiet at Colin's suggestion, but I don't know that it has to go subjunctive. I'm not a Shakespearean scholar, but searching Open Source Shakespeare for the word "when," I see several places where it could have gone subjunctive and didn't, e.g.: | |
| Jan 13, 2022 at 5:50 | comment | added | Dawood ibn Kareem | @ColinFine Surely it would be thou be done, not thou beest? Is beest recorded anywhere as a subjunctive version of be? Honestly, I'm actually slightly leaning to When thou think'st thyself to be done. | |
| Jan 13, 2022 at 2:22 | comment | added | Andy Bonner | @jogloran Thanks for the catch; I had misplaced the apostrophe. | |
| Jan 13, 2022 at 2:16 | history | edited | Andy Bonner | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jan 13, 2022 at 1:20 | comment | added | jogloran | "thinks't" is surely not correct. The 2nd person singular ending is -st; there's no contraction there. | |
| Jan 11, 2022 at 23:20 | comment | added | Colin Fine | I suspect that that in EME the subordinate clause would be subjunctive, so When thou think'st thou beest done. | |
| Jan 11, 2022 at 19:50 | history | answered | Andy Bonner | CC BY-SA 4.0 |