Somethingeth Funnyeth
In Old and Middle English, our inflectional system worked a bit differently. Take the verb love, for example:
Infinitive: to love
| I love | we love* |
| thou lovest | ye love* |
| he/she/it/one loveth | they love* |
*Depending on dialect, these forms may have had an s, n, or th on the end, but by the end of the Middle English period, these had been almost entirely lost.
Compare that with what we have today:
Infinitive: to love
| I love | we love |
|
you love
|
|
| he/she/it/one loves | they love |
The only variation that remains is the little “s” on the 3rd person singular form, in blue. We have lost the thou form entirely, and all of the various endings that could occur on the plural forms have been totally done away with.
Anyway, as I am sure you have noticed, when we read Middle English, it seems like everything has an “est” or an “eth” on the end, even though that’s not really true: they only occur on certain verbs and under certain circumstances. But this doesn’t stop us from throwing these endings all over the place when we want to sound Shakespearean. Usually, we indiscriminately tag endings on verbs, regardless of the subject they follow, but occasionally, someone will go hog wild, and throw ‘em on the end of everything. Like this gem of a sentence I saw in the comments section of a post at Unreasonable Faith:
And there’s NO WHERE in the Bible that says “be thouest the greatesteth personeth evereth by no spankingeth your brat child.”
They’re all over the place! This commenter put an “est” on the pronoun thou. They put the adjective great in the superlative by adding “est,” which is normal for today’s English, but they threw an “eth” on the end of that, just for the hell of it. They put “eth” on the noun person and the adverb ever, and even on the verb spank which already has the progressive ending ing.
Not to mention they are referring to the listener with the made-up pronoun “thouest” in the beginning, but switch back to using you to say your brat child.
I know that it was meant to be funny, so I am not making fun of this person. But as someone who has studied Old English, I am amused by what people think it meant to speak it. I think it’s cute.
Tags: English, Grammar, Language, Old English