Comments on: Talk Like Shakespeare Day

By: Ajan

Ajan — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:07:55 +0000

FREAK!!

By: door

door — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 18:25:06 +0000

Or you just read “Fool” and copy a more modern form:
‘Tis a fair amount of f****ry most foul to be found here

By: Kalel

Kalel — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 21:57:25 +0000

lol@Meg!

So true! After weeks on Renaissance Faire and Shakespeare festivals, I once answered ‘Aye’, when asked if I wanted fries with my Big Mac.

By: mike r baker

mike r baker — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 21:20:08 +0000

Renaissance Fair Speak (fake Elizabethan) uses the same rules but adds that sentence structure is more like… well, try talking like Yoda but with an English accent. And no cockney!

By: earl

earl — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 20:53:32 +0000

Take care when telling a woman “get thee to a nunnery.”
In Shakespeare’s day “nunnery” was slang for a whore house.

By: Snoot

Snoot — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 18:11:33 +0000

To expand on the employment of the word ‘Ye’, which was touched upon the gentleman who is operating under the alias of dd.:

Ye can be employed in two ways, firstly as the plural form of thou; so as to address a group of people, in such cases, it is sounded y?; and secondly as an alternate (in written contexts) to the word ‘the’. However, this is an alteration in spelling only, and does not in any way necessitate pronouncing it in any manner other than that of the greater-spotted ‘the’.

The reason for the word pronounced as ‘the’ being written as ‘ye’ arises due to Middle English’s thorn character coming to be written in the same manner as the y. As a spelling, it was used as a seemingly handy abbreviation in handwritting to ‘the’ until the 19th century, and in printers’ types during fifteenth and sixteenth century.

By: ammonihah99

ammonihah99 — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:31:05 +0000

Dang zeytoun beat me to it. Grrrrrrr . . .

By: dd.

dd. — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:06:12 +0000

Thee/ye: Thee is informal, ye is formal. Kind of like tu/vous in French. zeytoun’s correct about ye being plural as well (also like vous in French…)

By: Gail Pink

Gail Pink — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:56:48 +0000

This is even gayer than “Talk like a Priate day.”

By: meg

meg — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:04:02 +0000

if you read enough shakespeare in a short period of time, you end up speaking like him without noticing.

then people back away slowly from you at work D:

By: JMM

JMM — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 15:39:50 +0000

It helps to talk like Shakespeare if you’ve actually read Shakespeare.

By: zeytoun

zeytoun — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 15:32:08 +0000

“Thee” is not the plural form of “thou”.

“Thee” is singular, and is used when it is the object of the sentence. As in “I love thee”.

The plural of “thou” is “ye”

By: teknocholer

teknocholer — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 13:51:27 +0000

Just don’t time travel back to Shakespeare’s day and address someone as “Sirrah” if you don’t want a rapier through your liver. It’s a term of contempt, roughly the equivalent of “Hey, douchebag”. OTOH, it’s an ideal word if you’re involved in a flame war today.

By: carl

carl — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 13:35:57 +0000

methinks tis fun stuff…