A Brief Guide to Writing in a Shakespearean or “Old-Timey” Dialect
Sometimes when writing a character from the past, or even just when making memes about historical people, writers/creators use archaic words and phrases to emphasize their old-timey-ness. The problem is, lots of people just throw these words in willy-nilly, with little regard to grammar. Instead of making your character sound old-fashioned and sophisticated, they just sound like they don’t know what they’re talking about. For example:
So, instead of doing this:
Thou, thee, thy, and thine
‘Thou’ and its various forms are the informal second-person pronouns, and ‘you’ is the formal second-person pronoun. In English, the informal fell out of use and we started just calling everyone ‘you’, but if you’ve ever studied a Romance language like Spanish or French, you’ll be familiar with the formal/informal second-person split. Basically, if you’re addressing someone of your station or lower, you can call them ‘thou.’ If you’re addressing someone you speak to with respect, you should still call them ‘you’.
‘Thou’, ‘thee’, ‘thy’, and ‘thine’ are not interchangeable. They are comparable to the forms of ‘you’ or ‘I’ that still exist in English. If we make a chart of the different forms of modern pronouns, we can insert ‘thou’ in all its forms to compare:
If you’re struggling with which form to use, try swapping out the pronouns:
My friend will go with thou thee.
My friend will go with I me.
Some sample sentences:
Thou art a villain.
I want to be with thee.
Give me thy hand.
This book is thine.
Do it thyself.
Subject/Verb Agreement
Most people have noticed that archaic verbs sometimes have ‘-est’ or ‘-eth’ tacked onto the end. These aren’t just there for aesthetic; they have a grammatical purpose. ‘-est’ and ‘-eth’ are different verb conjugations. Again, if you’ve ever studied a foreign language, you’ll be familiar with conjugation charts, where you probably had to fill out different forms of verbs. ‘-est’ is the second-person verb suffix, and ‘-eth’ is the third-person verb suffix.
So for example, if we were to conjugate the verb ‘to run’ in its three singular forms:
I run
thou runnest
he/she/it runneth
Note that we cannot say “I runnest” or “thou runneth;” this is like saying “I runs” in modern English. The subject and verb need to agree. For some common verbs, the suffix can be contracted into the base verb, which is where you see things like:
thou do-est > thou doest > thou dost / she do-eth > she doeth > she doth
thou have-est > thou havest > thou hast / he have-eth > he haveth > he hath
So there you have it. Go forth and write your old-timey characters with joy and grammatical accuracy.
Oh! Another note on ‘thy’ vs. ‘thine’: occasionally, ‘thine’ is used as the dependent possessive pronoun (instead of independent possessive) if the word that follows begins with a vowel. This is the equivalent of the whole ‘a’ vs. ‘an’ thing in modern English; it’s because it sounds awkward to follow ‘thy’ with a vowel. So we can have “thy tongue” or “thy book” or “thy house,” but we have “thine eye” and “thine aunt” and “thine oily hair.”
