#History of English Language

[theenglishnook]

Captain Cook’s 1770 collision with the Great Barrier Reef gave English a global reach—new nautical terms, native words, and an imperial lexicon that still echoes in maps, science, and adventure stories.

[thelovingfriend]

[yeoldenews]

I came across the word "swaggereth" in a book from 1622 last night and felt like it should be shared with the world.

"Hee swaggereth, as though the whole Towne were his owne."

(source: Adagia in Latine and English, Erasmus, 1622.)

[typhlonectes]

[businesstiramisu]

This person has a more expansive definition of plagiarism than me, and I think some of the translation problems likely are more of a problem in their specific domains. But the points about re-wording the sources to be less accurate and just incorrectly citing sources altogether (using them as references for things those sources don't even say!!) seem likely to affect Wikipedia in general. I've certainly notice plenty of poorly written, confusing sentences on Wikipedia just in my casual browsing.

And the "cascading errors" -- arising from multiple editors trying "improve" articles without checking the sources, thus making the Wikipedia article *more* incorrect -- seems like an intrinsic property of how wikipedia works.

[leisureflame]

THOU, THEE, THY, THINE. SAME THING RIGHT?

NO.

Although they seem very similar, Shakespeare would be in tears if he saw how most people mix them up. lets save William the misery and teach you when to correctly use thou, thy, and thine.

THOU

Thou = You (in subject form)

"Thou art killing me." "Art Thou crying?"

THEE

Thee = You (in object form)

"I want to kill thee." "My dog ate thee in my dream."

THY

Thy = Your (before a word that starts with a consonant)

"Thy mother." "Give me thy duck."

Thyself is used the same as any other thy+word combination like "thy mother" but without a space

"Take care of thyself."

THINE

Thine = Your (before a word that starts with a vowel)

"Thou art on thine own." "Thine answer hath satisfied mine query."

OR

Thine = Yours

“This is thine.” “The throne is thine, should thou choose to take it.”

(last 2 examples by @bookishwenchmeltha)

Now Shakespeare can truly rest in peace.

Go follow me @leisureflame for more posts like this!

[amanufacturedheaven]

Rare Language Learning: Polari

If you have ever used the words:

- Naff

- Butch

- Camp

You have unknowingly been speaking the sociolect known as Polari, the language of queer people primarily used in the 30s to the 70s. Polari is now an endangered language, as labelled by the University of Cambridge

Something of note: Many resources out there imply (or state) that Polari was a language invented and used solely by white cis gay men, which is decidedly untrue. Many words of Polari come from drag culture, lesbians, and the Romani people and their language. The use of ‘the language of British gay men’ may be a more palatable title to the general public, but it is not to me. I did my best to curate a variety of resources, but unfortunately much of queer history has been lost many more decades than I’ve been alive, if you have any other resources for studying Polari I would love to read them, message me or leave a link in the replies.

Articles

Learn Polari, the Secret Language of the Gays ⚢ Out Magazine

Polari: The code language gay men used to survive ⚢ BBC

Polari and the Hidden History of Gay Seafarers ⚢ National Museums Liverpool

The Story of Polari, Britain’s Secret Gay Language ⚢ Fabulosa!

Polari People ⚢ Fabulosa!

Polari: a language born from prejudice ⚢ Englishpanish

The secretive gay language that gave LGBTQ people a voice ⚢ GAYTIMES

A brief history of Polari: the curious after-life of the dead language for gay men ⚢ The Conversation

Study Material

The Polari Bible ⚢ Internet Archive

Fantabulosa: A Dictionary of Polari and Gay Slang ⚢ Internet Archive

Sociolinguistics / Polari ⚢ StudySmarter

FlashCards ⚢ Quizlet

New Polari Translator ⚢ LingoJam

Polari: A sociohistorical study of the life and decline of a secret language. ⚢ Dissertation, University of Manchester

Polari: a language born from prejudice ⚢ Englishpanish

Simon Bowkett: a short blog in Polari for LGBT+ History Month ⚢ Civil Service LGBT+ Network

[elizabethan-memes]

I see "Mary Queen of Scots was Elizabeth's greatest rival" is making the rounds on social media again.

Come on now. I'm not asking y'all to like Philip but let's not ignore him.

One of these rivals had an empire. One of these rivals resulted in Elizabeth sending troops abroad, against her preferred MO. One of these rivals had a cold war-hot war with Elizabeth that didn't end until YEARS AFTER BOTH OF THEM WERE DEAD. One of these rivals sent an Armada after Elizabeth (and she sent one back but we memory-holed it lol.) One of these rivalries was so pressing that England ALLIED WITH INDIGENOUS PEOPLE IN THE AMERICAS. One of these rivalries spurred ENGLISH COLONISATION OF NORTH AMERICA. The lives of people THOUSANDS OF MILES AWAY were affected by these bitches and their rivalry.

And one of these rivals never met Elizabeth, spent 19 years in her custody, and then fell victim to a classic case of entrapment.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

could you, perhaps, talk a bit about Middle English? thank you, you're so cool

Writing Notes: Middle English

Middle English alphabet

The chronological boundaries of the Middle English period:

Not easy to define, and scholarly opinions vary.

The dates that OED3 has settled on are 1150-1500.

Before 1150 being the Old English period, and after 1500 being the early modern English period.

In terms of ‘external’ history, Middle English is framed at its beginning by the after-effects of the Norman Conquest of 1066, and at its end by the arrival in Britain of printing (in 1476) and by the important social and cultural impacts of the English Reformation (from the 1530s onwards) and of the ideas of the continental Renaissance.

Two very important linguistic developments characterize Middle English:

in grammar, English came to rely less on inflectional endings and more on word order to convey grammatical information. (If we put this in more technical terms, it became less ‘synthetic’ and more ‘analytic’.) Change was gradual, and has different outcomes in different regional varieties of Middle English, but the ultimate effects were huge: the grammar of English c.1500 was radically different from that of Old English. Grammatical gender was lost early in Middle English. The range of inflections, particularly in the noun, was reduced drastically (partly as a result of reduction of vowels in unstressed final syllables), as was the number of distinct paradigms: in most early Middle English texts most nouns have distinctive forms only for singular vs. plural, genitive, and occasional traces of the old dative in forms with final –e occurring after a preposition. In some other parts of the system some distinctions were more persistent, but by late Middle English the range of endings and their use among London writers shows relatively few differences from the sixteenth-century language of, for example, Shakespeare: probably the most prominent morphological difference from Shakespeare’s language is that verb plurals and infinitives still generally ended in –en (at least in writing).

in vocabulary, English became much more heterogeneous, showing many borrowings from French, Latin, and Scandinavian. Large-scale borrowing of new words often had serious consequences for the meanings and the stylistic register of those words which survived from Old English. Eventually, various new stylistic layers emerged in the lexicon, which could be employed for a variety of different purposes.

One other factor marks out the bulk of our Middle English evidence from the bulk of our Old English or early modern English evidence, although it is less directly a matter of change in the language than in how it is represented in writing:

the surviving Middle English material is dominated by regional variation, and by (sometimes extreme) variation in how the same underlying linguistic units are represented in writing.

This is not because people suddenly started using language in different ways in different places in the Middle English period, but because the fairly standardized late Old English literary variety broke down completely, and writing in English became fragmented, localized, and to a large extent, improvised.

Some Terminology

Great Vowel Shift - A systematic change in the long vowels in late Middle English that resulted in a new array of vowels, which includes diphthongs and tense vowels but which no longer generates a systematic distinction for length. Also called the Tudor Vowel Shift.

Lengthening - The change of a short vowel to a long vowel; it took place systematically during Middle English.

Levelling - The loss of distinctions in inflected endings, especially in early Middle English.

Thorn - A letter from the Germanic runic alphabet added to the Latin alphabet in Anglo-Saxon England to transcribe dental fricatives. It was used through the Middle English period and was gradually replaced by the sequence [th].

Wynn - A letter form adapted from the Germanic futhorc to indicate the sound [w] in the writing of Old English. It was used up to the Middle English period.

Yogh - A letter form used in Middle English and derived from the earlier insular letter form for [g]. In Middle English it was used for one of several consonant sounds.

Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ⚜ More: Notes ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

Some French Loans in Middle English Part 1 2

Some Renaissance & Latin Loan Words in Middle English

"Beautiful" Middle English Words

You are too sweet (I'm farthest away from the definition of "cool" haha). Do go through the links above for more details as well as an online Middle English dictionary. Hope this helps with your writing!

[theenglishnook]

Accession of Queen Elizabeth I – The Golden Age of Words and Expression

Elizabeth I's reign (1558–1603) revolutionized English, enriching it through Shakespearean words, global trade terms, and national pride. The Elizabethan Era set the stage for Modern English as we know it today.

November 17, 1558 On this day, Queen Elizabeth I ascended to the English throne, heralding the beginning of the Elizabethan Era, a transformative period in English history that profoundly shaped the English language. Often referred to as a “Golden Age” for English culture, her reign (1558–1603) saw significant advancements in literature, exploration, and national identity. This era not only…

[gammija]

ig another annoying thing about the 'this transcends language 😲😱' comments about the most obvious of cognates and literal english loanwords, is that it's another example of how native english speakers (and, by virtue of their population size, mostly USamericans) are the arbiters of what gets seen as 'universal' vs what's weird and foreign on the anglophone internet. cause to me as a dutch speaker, a lot of german compound words would '''transcend language''' - but the tweets that go viral about those kinds of words are about how they're silly little nonsense words to laugh at, can't be a real language, can you believe anyone speaks that!

[yeoldenews]

Why do young kids sound so adult in old letters? Not just the ones you share, in general. It's one of the things that puzzles me about Yes Virginia, There is A Santa Claus. Were educational standards stricter? Was it actually parents writing for them?

If I had to guess, I'd say a decent part of this could be due to the fact that everyday, standard English at the time used a structure and level of formality we now associate with the elderly. It's similar to how teenagers in the past look older to us in part because we associate the styles of their hair and makeup with our parents and grandparents.

The first particular piece of syntax that popped into my head when I read this message is the placement of the word "have" in sentence structure. It used to be standard English grammar to begin questions about items or traits people possess with "have" rather than "do you have"; e.g. "Have you a pencil?" vs. "Do you have a pencil?".

If I were to hear the question "Have you any presents you'd like for Christmas?" my mind would default to imagining a formal, elderly person, as that's the only type of person I've ever personally heard use that syntax.

I think what we sometimes fail to consciously realize is that the stuffy, formal, 90 year old grandmothers we talk to didn't spontaneously start talking like that once they reached a certain age. They were taught certain grammar rules as children and continued to use them throughout their lives. We only associate that type of language with the elderly as the only people still alive to use it are now very old.

Education in the past also relied much more heavily on rote memorization and repetition, which I'd imagine caused people to more strictly adhere to the things they learned, including grammar, than we do now.

Children were taught in school how to write formal letters and those lessons were carried over even in letters to Santa.

I imagine in the future the phrase "I hope this email finds you well" is going to end up seeming (even more) oddly formal and dated, but people use it because that's what we were taught to do.

That being said, there are definitely Dear Santa letters written by parents, especially if the child is very young - but after 14 years of doing this I think I've developed a pretty good eye for spotting these. That's why I rarely post letters from children under school-age, with the exception of what I've taken to calling "toddler transcription" where the parents write down what their young child says word for word.

[fishandshesmygills]

i hope the liberal arts education never dies. everyone should get the chance to dabble in classics on their way to their science degree

[anotherchariotpulledbycats]

mfs be like 'I can speak Old English lol' and they put on some garbled mix of a Posh and RP accent

Þis is hwæt eald Englisċ ġelīciaþ, dwǣsas.

[fluffypotatey]

just gonna say my peace and then spam reblog some more posts but

when Remmick talks about the “Our Father” and how he was forced to learn it from the people who stole their lands. that can still mean he was Catholic despite being about 600 years old in Ireland where Catholicism was running rampant, but it just means he was Irish Catholic. yeah, 600 years is not far enough for there to be an Ireland where Catholicism was not the majority religion, but you know what wasn’t something many Irish from 600 years ago (until 1930s) did???

spoke English

so it is very likely Remmick was not talking about the religion itself but rather being forced to lose his mother tongue by the English invading and colonizing Irish lands. forcing the stop of speaking Irish also had two major goals 1) control over the people and the property and the laws and 2) “unity” through one kingdom, one empire, yada yada— VERY reminiscent of the themes presented in the movie

just something to think about

[ocdhuacheng]

Would be so fucking badass and sexy for someone to dub Vinland saga accurately in old Norse w old english/welsh/french etc (incl mi’kmaq bc im on copium that we will be getting a complete anime adaptation eventually) anyway that would be insanely awesome I know it’s not gonna happen obviously but a bitch can dream