Olde Worldy

Try searching "archaic". Might be some links or resources down on the historical fiction forum. What time period are you aiming for?

Folofop said:

As for time period? Erm, I really don't know. I've got in my mind really posh Shakesperian I guess.

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You are setting yourself up for an intimidating amount of research that even a professor of literature might blanch at. There is much more to Shakespearian dialogue than thee & thou. To write it convincingly you would have to familiarise yourself with the vocabulary and syntax used at the time. You would also have to know the preoccupations of the era, the limits of knowledge, the terms those people thought in and expressed themselves in.

It's far easier to make up your own dialects that feel olde-worlde. Just be consistent. Then you won't have Shakespeare scholars ripping your work to shreds!

http://www.etymonline.com/

This is my favorite site. It should help a lot.

thee Look up thee at Dictionary.com
O.E. þe (accusative and dative singular of þu "thou"), from P.Gmc. *theke (cf. O.Fris. thi, M.Du. di, O.H.G. dih, Ger. dich, O.N. þik, Norw. deg, Goth. þuk), from PIE *tege-. A brief history of the second person pronoun in Eng. can be found here. The verb meaning "to use the pronoun 'thee' to someone" is recorded from 1662, from the rise of Quakerism (see thou).

"This was the Bottom upon which the Quakers first set up, to run down all worldly Honour ...; to Thee and Thou; to call no Man Master, or Lord, and not to take off their Hats, or Bow to any." [Charles Leslie, "The Snake in the Grass," 1696]

thy Look up thy at Dictionary.com
possessive pronoun of 2nd person sing., c.1175, reduced form of þin (see thine), originally used before consonants except H. In 15c., used before vowels, too.

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It's good for dating words as well as origins and uses. It's a real cool site.

You are going to have to watch, you could be setting yourself up for a huge fall.

Middle English is highly complex; it was only starting to be standardised. One county would use certain words, where the next county wouldn't have a clue what they were saying. This is complicated by the different influences from different invasions (i.e the influence of French in the south from the Normans; or the influence of Scandinavian from the Vikings in the north east.) Words like 'thee' and 'thou' aren't different words, they are dialectal variations of the modern 'you.'

gothicangel said:

Words like 'thee' and 'thou' aren't different words, they are dialectal variations of the modern 'you.'

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They're the second person singular, "you" being the plural. "Thou" is the nominative case, "thee" the accusative/dative.

My WIP takes place in 17th-century England and I've written it as if it were a contemporaneous narration. But I'm not getting into thees and thous because a) most of my characters are servants and it doesn't seem fitting, and b) it gets tiring. Instead my narrative language is a bit more formal and flowery in structure. So rather than using "olde world" words, I'm focusing on sentence structure and even word order to make it more formal sounding.

Whether I'm succeeding is yet to be known, but my influence is a wonderful book called Thomas the Rhymer by Ellen Kushner. She gets it right. Most important is that it doesn't sound too forced, and that every character still retains a distinctive voice.

It's hard, and I probably shouldn't have tried this in my first work, but in my case I felt the story demanded it, so I'm trying to comply.

This is an interesting question. I think your solution to the problem of thee and thou etc. should depend on what context you have it placed in. Why does only one character speak this way? Is he a time traveler who is in fact from the time of Shakespeare? If so, then reading a lot of Shakespeare might be helpful.

In my current WIP, I have three characters with vastly different speaking styles, each of which is based on a different work of classical literature from a different time period - but there are very concrete reasons for why this is the case. Each of these people is from the historical time period in question, and has personal reasons to have been influenced by a work of literature which was published during that time.

If you are working with a fantasy world with an approximative historical placement (like a medieval technology level, for example) then you're more free to come up with your own linguistic solutions to this problem. Reading Shakespeare might still be a real plus for working out the proper voice, but you'll want to establish exactly what the linguistic and cultural background of this character is (as with the servants in Gentle Giant's post) so as to place his voice in a meaningful way.