Re: Dialect & accent (was: Announcement: New auxlang "Choton")

On Tuesday, October 12, 2004, at 03:07 , Trebor Jung wrote:

> Ray írta: "A few older dialect relicts remain, e.g. in my native Sussex,
> the
> simple present tense affixes -(e)s for _all_ persons, not just the 3rd
> singular."
>
> So is this where 'methinks' comes from?

Nope!  [American]

We'd never use 'me' I subject of a verb! The colloquial Sussex for "I
think" is "I thinks".

'methinks' is in fact Shakespearean and does _not_ mean 'I think'; it
means "It seems to me". The 'me' part was originally the dative case and
the verb is impersonal: "me thinketh" = 'it sees to me'.

It survived as a set phrase in early modern English. Far from "methinks'
being a Sussexism, I picked it up from Conlang!

The was a vogue for using it a few years back and IIRC it was US
contributors that used it more often. It just makes a change from IMO   :)

Ray
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]