Inventing English

Shakespeare's plays and poems ripple with these nuances of usage, as he absorbs what was changing in the English of his day into the power of his fiction. But Shakespeare was acutely conscious of the older forms of speech. Take, for example, the second-person pronoun. As I illustrated in my chapters on Old and Middle English, there were two second-person-pronoun forms throughout the history of language. "You" forms were formal and plural ; "thou" forms were singular and informal. These were grammatical and social categories, and in Shakespeare's time they still had force.

The scene between Prince Hal and Falstaff indicates just how the drama of exchange, plays out in pronouns. When Hal asks Falstaff to play himself, he says : "Do thou stand for me." Whatever roles they play, Hal should call Falstaff "thou", both because they are intimate friends, but also because Falstaff remains, whatever their games, the Prince's social inferior. Playacting as his father, Henry IV, Prince Hal speaks to his son (now played by Falstaff) : "Now, Harry, whence come you ?" He speaks in the formal, a king to a prince. But when this play king chides his errant son he shifts into the "thou" form : "Swearest, thou, ungracious boy ?" He condescends, complains, demeans. The imagined son here moves to a lower rank before the anger of the father. And when Falstaff, playing the Prince, addresses the play king, he responds in kind : "I would your grace should take me with you". "You" forms signal deference and respect - an attitude Falstaff clearly forgets toward the end of his speech, when he begs Hal, playing Henri IV, not to banish Falstaff from "thy Harry's company". The lapse in pronouns signals Falstaff lapse in decorum.

p. 132-133

During the six decades of Shakespeare's life, more words entered the English language than at any other time in history. Science and commerce, exploration and colonial expansion, literature and art, - all contributed to an increased vocabulary drawn from Latin, Greek, and the European and non-European languages. While the lexicon of Old English took only 3% of its vocabulary from elsewhere, nearly 70% of our modern English lexicon comes from non-English sources.

p. 141