Re: USAGE: The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
| From: | Sally Caves <scaves@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, December 10, 2006, 16:21 |
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I'm coming WAY late to this, Mark, so I'm sure others have confirmed the
fact that this is just your old impersonal verb, imported almost verbatim
from Old English: me thinceth, "it seems to me." Other ones that dropped
out: me reweth, "it is sad to me," me liketh, "it pleases me." I believe
Icelandic and some of the other Scandinavian languages still have "it dreams
to me."
Sorry to be so dilatory. Haven't checked my scaves account in weeks. How's
everybody? More letters to look at.
S.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Monday, November 27, 2006 6:39 PM
Subject: USAGE: The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
> 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"...
>
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