In which Ten remembers to post

[tenebris]

I keep writing these posts later and later, usually because I'm caught up in doing something else: reading, playing with the cat, engaging in a dorky bout of trying to translate Middle English...

(That would be a reference to this particle_person post, which contains a passage from John Heywood and a fascinating question having to do with said passage. And also

Comments

[particle_person]

You know, I was wondering if Heywood is even properly Middle English -- isn't 1546 late enough to be Early Modern? I noticed that the plurals are formed with an 's' the way we do, rather than the -en business.

[tenebris]

I was thinking about that, too, when I was looking at those dates. It's probably more like Early Modern--it certainly reads easily enough as Early Modern, and it was a printed book, no?--but that makes it possibly more inscrutable. Whee, language change!

I am totally blanking on when the -en plural fell out, but it did so awfully quickly. There's a whole mess about that being used on weak nouns (the -an declension), but...suffice to say, I don't know if it was used into Middle English. Endings fell off by the SCORE during that age.

This is why I should stick to Old English and just shut up, I swear. ;)

[particle_person]

Also, it was published in London, which is where the Chancery Standard stuff went down right about that time, so it would have been the most modern form of the language at that date.