A Quick Lesson in King James English
Nov 16th, 2007 by Micah Tillman | 5 Comments |
Silly Me just commented on my post below using King James English. It reminded me that I’ve been wanting to correct some common misunderstandings of KJE (not that she made any. It just reminded me). So here’s a short tutorial. (Make sure to correct me if you find any mistakes :-)
Pronouns
First Person
Same as current English
Second Person
Singular: subject–”thou,” object–”thee” || Plural: subject–”ye,” object–”you”
Third Person
Same as current English
Possessive Prounouns
First Person
Same as in current English, but change “my” to “mine” before words beginning with a vowel (similar to how “a” changes to “an”).
Second Person
Singular–”Thy”; change to “thine” before words beginning with a vowel || Plural–Same as current English
Third Person
Same as current English
Verbs
First Person
Same as current English
Second Person
Singular–Add “est” to the stem (as in “knowest,” “goest,” “thinkest”) or add a “t” to verbs ending in “s” (as in “hast”)
[Except in the case of imperatives; With imperatives, the form is the same as First Person]
Third Person
Singular–Add “eth” to the stem (as in “knoweth,” “goeth,” “thinketh”) or replace final “s” with “th” (as in “hath”).
[Except in cases where modal auxiliary verbs (like "would," or "may") are required. In such cases, the form is the same as the First Person.]
“To Be”
Same as in current English, but Second Person Singular is “art”
Common Mistakes
Adding endings to First Person verbs.
Mixing up “thee” and “thou.”
“…change “my” to “mine” before words beginning with a vowel (similar to how “a” changes to “an”).”
This is actually the subject of a question on the GRE Subject test in Literature in English, and it must be of some importance, because it is on more than one of them.
This is a great little primer though, and it reminds me of how much I love German and earlier modes of English.
:-) Thanks!
Thinking about all this is enough to make one want to learn really old English so one can read Beowulf in the original (especially now that the movie version is coming out).
Beowulf in OE is more tedious than you might think. I took Old English last year — and it was pretty hard, although fascinating — but I would argue that there are better things to be reading than Beowulf. The Battle of Brunanburh, for example. Or The Fates of The Apostles. Or The Wonders of the East. There are also huge numbers of theological works and homilies to read; far more of those are in existence than the poetry.
If you want to, though, you can learn the basics and be translating with maybe half a year’s study, depending on how good you are at memorizing grammatical paradigms. There three genders plus plurals, in five cases, which means that there are about sixteen ways to say “the” alone. It’s a little crazy.
A good place to start would be to get a copy of Hasenfratz & Jambeck’s “Reading Old English”. (http://www.readingoldenglish.com/) It’ll probably cost about $40-50 (it’s relatively new; you might have trouble tracking it down in a library) but it’s probably the best resource out there. There’s a lot of teaching in it, instead of being just grammar, so you could probably self-teach with some patience.
For more online resources, you van visit my prof’s personal webpage: http://individual.utoronto.ca/patrickmcbrine/ . Probably you could contact him as well if you liked — he’s super nice and exceedingly smart.
You did not mention the distinction between the formal and informal second person or the word ye.
Thou, thee, thy, and thine are informal in early modern English.
Ye, you, your, and yours were used for formal singular and plural and for informal plural.
[...] of you may remember that I wrote a short post on King James English a little while back. I asked to be informed if anyone caught a mistake on my [...]