Conversational English in 1586

Always up for a pint of wine

I love this sort of thing. Just a French lad trying to help his fellow French refugees, and accidentally creates a brilliant primer on honest-to-goodness 16th c. street English, not the "proper" stuff taught at school. I'm sure Mr. Bellot would've been pleased to see us finding such utility in his humble phrasebook, all these centuries later.

"Let us have a reckoning". Gotta remember that one next time I'm at Aldi

I hear people speaking like this normally when i hide in the bushes to hear people talk

I'm honestly amazed at how comprehensible this is. I had expected much more Middle-English era words and grammar to be present, especially in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift, but now I'm happy that, were I to acquire a time machine, I could have a pint with the lads 400 years ago 😂

“god be wy” looks like how someone might type “god be with you” over text lol

I love that old "how is it with you?" ... literally how it's said in the Netherlands and Norway

7:22 lmao he said “farewell, then” 😂😂 That made me laugh idk why. I wish haggling like this was available everywhe

'What do you lack?' sounds like my late grandmother, who lived in the Appalachian mountains, when asking if we wanted seconds at the dinner table. This is a fascinating book! Thanks for the excellent video.

Probably one of the best talks yet. A controversial view but one I am growing more and more to believe is that what Shakespeare wrote in the 1590s to 1610s was NOT everyday speech of that time but was some sort of confected recollected speech from perhaps 50 years earlier and then corrupted by memory and grandeloquence. I have a long text written by a very articulate man, John Mayer, Master of Sedbergh School in the 1590s. He was no fool, but a fellow of St. John's Cambridge. Like this gentleman he writes much more freely that Shakespeare makes his characters speak. The text was an answer to a Chancery Bill, but John Mayer was not a Lawyer and so he literally wrote to describe his everyday experience as articulately as he could, and he was articulate.

Interestingly, I'm starting to hear modern youth say, "Can I come with?" not, "Can I come with you?" Mitkommen is German, but in English this appears to be making a strange comeback.

We still routinely greet people with "How..." in the north-east. "How lad, ya alreet?"

You should visit the west of Ireland where some of these things are still common. One weird thing is that we use "ye" (pronounced "yee") strictly as a plural for "you". Most of the time, people who hear this don't realize it's a plural and assume it's just a weird way of pronouncing "you". One time on a work trip to the US someone asked why we sometimes say "you" and sometimes "yee". I realized then it's not obvious because a lot of English speakers don't make any singular/plural distinction for "you" at all.

I read books from the 1500s, albeit printed in the early 1600s. Sometimes people look over my shoulder and ask me if it's Old English. "No," I tell them. "It's Early Modern English. Not too different from today, innit?" Cheers! Thanks. Lovely, this. Keep making these videos.

I don't know a lot about how Londoners spoke in 1586, but I do remember when I was a young child in NE England in the 1960s, that when counting money in shops, in phrases like 'two pence', 'three pence', 'six pence', people always used to stress the number and not the word 'pence'. So they said 'tuppence', 'threppence', 'sixpence' as if they were single words. The coins were known as 'tuppney, threpney and sixpenny' bits. But when the UK currency was decimalised in 1971, people in shops started saying, instead, "That will be six new pence, please' stressing the fact that it was new pence and not old. After a few years, they stopped saying 'new pence'. But the word pence continued to hold its stress. I never heard the word 'bit' used for coins any more after that. They became known as two-pence, five-pence and ten-pence pieces. Does anyone else remember this?

this is what I came here for! The development of English as a spoken language. thanks Simon, for getting back to this topic.

One of my favourite British English greetings which makes no sense when I think about it is "Now then". Me and my friends use it all the time

I like how this is pretty much how conversational or utilitarian language books are written today. Everyday dialogues, sometimes a bit stilted, and often presented in the same three columns: the language to be learned, the meaning in your own language, and a transliteration of the new language in your own phonetics.

I was born in Lancashire but have lived most of my life in the Netherlands. I speak Dutch fluently and without an English accent and am convinced that me having a broad Lancashire accent helped me as there are so many words and ways if speaking Dutch that are almost the same. We always hear English compared to French or German but really Dutch, Flemish and most of the Scandinavian languages are more similar.

Working with a crew of hillbillies in western North Carolina years ago. The boss comes over the radio: "Hey, Buster, how much d'you lack on that job?" Buster, visibly frustrated, answers, "I don't lack none of it". The boss goes silent for a moment, gritting his teeth at the pun. "Damn it, Buster..."