ENGLISH DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY

[martyfan]

So I've had a few people talk to me lately who are convinced that Shakespeare wrote in Old English. Being an English major and a passionate yet asexual lover of books, this bugs the ever-loving shit out of me. Therefore I have decided to write up a quick history lesson... ish... thing. Including examples!

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[martyfan]

I learned a lot of this in British Literature last year - we started not with the actual writing, but the history of how the language evolved, which was kind of awesome. Learned all sorts of nifty tidbits I never knew before, like the swear words vs. "polite" words thing, as well as why it changed to be the wacky hybrid that it is now. (Although it took me until taking German this year that I understand our silent "gh"s, for example, night - it comes from the German word nicht, where the "ch" is pronounced kind of like cat hissing.)

It also came in handy when I wrote my story for NaNoWriMo, although I went the other way. The main character is from the 51st century and speaks a language that descended from English, but he lives on a colony world and humans have had contact with non-English-speaking aliens for centuries, so the vocabulary and sentence structure's changed enough that it's like us trying to understand Old English in runic form. I haven't gone far enough to fully invent a whole new form of English just for that, since the narration would get boring that way and make no sense if I told it in gibberish, but I like to throw it in where appropriate.