#langauage

저의 아주 정돈되지 않은 일본어 배우기 노트들 ㅋㅋㅋ

Something I didn’t know until I took a class on this history of English in college; thought some people on here might find it cool.

“Thou” and “you” co-existed for a long time. The difference is like the one between “tu” and “vous” in French: thou is informal, you is formal. Like everything in English, this probably isn’t an iron-clad rule and probably developed and changed over time, but I remembered it because it actually adds depth to what I’m reading.

It means there’s nuance embedded in how people address each other that you might otherwise miss! 

wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name; Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And I'll no longer be a Capulet.   

I bet at the time this had a very clear connotation of being super forward. (I mean, Juliet, you just met the guy, you’re being awful tender awful fast here.) Romeo’s just as bad; look up the text, search it, there’s not a single “you” in the balcony scene. It’s “thou” this and “thine” that and get a room, you two. 

Whereas in the pun-insults exchange between Capulet and Montague servants that opens the play, it’s all: No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I do bite my thumb, sir.   They’re not close and friendly, so it’s “you.”

Oh, and the nurse calls Juliet “thou” all the time--and that probably meant something to audiences of the day, too. I can’t say whether it just shows how much she loves her or if it’s meant to show how over-familiar she is as part of the comedy of her character, but it says something. 

Benvolio calls Romeo “you” as well as “thou” at different times. I’d have to re-read the play to pick up whether there’s a pattern in which when, but probably there is.   

It can get tricky--you’ll be informal with people you feel close with, but you’ll also be informal with people you consider your inferiors. 

 Which brings me to Tolkien and the exchange between Eowyn and the Nazgul, because Tolkien was a student of the history of languages and you know he knew this and was doing it on purpose.

“Get thee gone, foul dwimmerlaik, lord of carrion! Leave the dead in peace.”

“Come not between the Nazgul and his prey, for he shall not slay thee in thy turn. He shall bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shriveled mind left naked to the lidless eye.”

“Do what you will; but I will hinder it, if I may.”

“Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me.”

“But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Eowyn am I, Eomund’s daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Get thee gone, if thou be not deathless--for living or dark undead, I shall smite you, if you touch him.”

(That’s written from memory, but I’m pretty sure I got the pronouns right. I really love this scene.)

There’s a lot going on here! The Witch-King sticks with the scornful, you-are-my-inferior thee/thou/thy, but Eowyn switches back and forth. 

Here’s how I read it; anyone with more than one college class’s worth of background on this, please chip in. 

- “Get thee gone”--scorn, defiance, telling the enemy to go screw himself. No respect.

- “Do what you will”--OK, maybe you’re a worthy opponent, but I’m still defying you. Come at me, bro. 

- “You look upon a woman”--still in the formal mode at the start here, but switches to:

-  “Get thee gone”--ordering him away, disdainful. I’m not a man, so I can hinder you. Now scram or I’ll kick your ass.

Wrestling with Shakespeare is good for the brain. Scientists have shown that reading the Bard and other classical writers has beneficial effects on the mind.

Works from Shakespeare, Chaucer, Wordsworth and D H Lawrence challenge readers because of their unusual words, tricky sentence structure and the repetition of phrases.

English professors at Liverpool University who teamed up with neuroscientists armed with brain-imaging equipment found that this challenge causes the brain to light up with electrical activity. Professor Philip Davis, who led the study at the university's department of English, said: "The brain appears to become baffled by something unexpected in the text that jolts it into a higher level of thinking.

They were also able to identify that the Shakespeare sparked activity across a far wider area of the brain than "plain" text, with the greatest concentration in a key area associated with language in the temporal lobe known as the Sylvian Fissure.