Bonus 70: Speakest Thou Ye Olde English?

An example of old timey French, "point" instead of "pas" (not) comes up a lot, as does the gratuitous use of the "passé simple" verb tense. Titles are a big one in French too, especially since the French Revolution did away with them.

Attorney (in USA) here. In the courtroom we refer to the judge as Your Honor, which I think is pretty well known. But it is also very common for that to extend to "your honor's" rather than a simple "you" when talking to the judge. And even when referring to the judge to a third person, very common to see a "her honor," if the judge is in earshot. E.g., "your honor is right that..." "well, what I think her honor was trying to ask..." Definitely feels like overkill but you get used to saying it. This episode made me think on that a lot!

I was delighted to hear about the Society for Creative Anachronism. Although I now live in St. Paul, MN, in the early 80s neighbors in our apartment building in Chicago were a couple who were editors of Tournaments Illuminated. Their names, as well as I can remember, Friar Bertrand of Bearington and Eromine Aspasia of Constantinople. (I don't remember their 20th-century names.) Gretchen mentioned being locked into conclave. Fun fact which you probably know: Conclave derives from Latin "with key" so the cardinals were indeed locked in. Very interesting episode! PS. I am baffled as to how to get logged into Discord, so I have to post here.

I can't do paragraph breaks on my phone apparently. Here's the connection to the podcast 🎉 --- We see the vestiges of the Spanish way of doing this in Don Quijote, where the protagonist often uses an archaic future tense which is a clear evolution of the verb Haber, an auxiliary verb that works like "has" in "has done" type phrases in English. For example, "He de buscar" would be "I must seek", but can also be used to indicate what I will do...because I must! Turns out that modern Portuguese has preserved this separation of syllables, and the funny future tense verbs actually come from a "have to do this" kind of phrasing. So the Ye Olde Commande Forme in French and so on looks like that for a very interesting little linguistic reason. Who'd'a'thunk? 🤷‍♂️

As a Spanish teacher I can comment on the way Spanish and Portuguese future tenses arose. I imagine something similar occurred in French. The phenomenon is most obvious in Portuguese where the future tense verb ending starts with a vowel and can either be added to the infinitive form OR added to the direct object (the compound word for some direct plus indirect object phrases) as another syllable, which are both then appended to the infinitive form of the verb. Like so: dizerei (I will say) can be extended by the addition of a -te- infix, dizer-te-ei, too mean "I will say to you", or even dizer-to-ei, where the -to- infix is a combination of "to you" and "it", to mean "I will tell you it". Fascinating.

Yes! I loved the book The Witch of Blackbird Pond in middle school but the misuse of Thee as a subject pronoun is grating to the ear. (I listened to the audiobook for a reread recently...)

As a nerdy teenager I used to get so frustrated with people using "Ye Olde Englishe" with all the "wrong" grammar etc. It seems like it was mostly an attempt at Shakespearean English but people would get tripped up on where to use thee/thou/thine/thy etc and I always had to bite my tongue because I knew it was meant to be just for fun. I think I actually learned most of my "Olde Timey Englishe" from hymns in church, and now that I look back on those, I'm fairly sure a lot of them are anachronistic and doing exactly what people do now with trying to make their language sound fancier by using archaic words. If I had the time I'd love to go back through the old hymn books and work out how appropriate the language was for the actual time period it was written in.

Chekhov

One of my favorite examples of this type of anarchism is Brennan Lee Mulligan improvising a Shakespearean In-Flight Safety Video: https://youtu.be/nJmfsl6Or10

Also i feel like just in general your essay on future English would overlap well with her worldbuilding for Terra Ignota. I know her next series has Vikings in it, so maybe there's some languagy stuff there to discuss? Idk but i would just really love to see two of my nerdoms come together

I love Ada Palmer so much and would love to hear you two chat with her! Maybe discuss how she came up with the terms in her books like ba'sib, etc and also how her work in history and anime crosses over to language stuff?