Re: USAGE: The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

On 11/27/06, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
> Just curious here - what's going on with the quote in the subject
> line?  Why "doth" but "methinks", rather than "does" or "methinketh"?
>
> Throughout Shakespeare, the usual 3p sg ending is -s, but -th also
> shows up all over the place.  Was English of the time still
> mid-transition?  Were -th and -s in free alternation, or had -th been
> relegated to certain contexts, either phonetic or semantic?  (maybe
> "high-falutin' speech used by royalty", or "poetry", etc...)  I note
> that _Hamlet_ includes examples of both "doth" and "does", "singeth"
> and "sings"...
Your guesses are right on. The competition between -eth and -(e)s was
originally based in regional variation, with -(e)s being northern and
-eth being southern. The -(e)s form spread down over part of the
Midlands during the Middle English period, but -eth was still common
in the south when the literary language was taking shape, and so it
became the standard. The distinction gradually became one of
formality, but -eth didn't really disappear until the 18th century.
-eth was (is) always syllabic, so authors in the 16th and 17th
centuries had the choice to use it when rhythm was an issue.

(The foregoing was a summary of discussion found in Charles Barber's
book _Early Modern English_, which is quite readable and worth looking
at.)

Dirk

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