Older ways of writing

[Kaziarl]

I've been reading through some of the older books in my collection lately and have been noticing things that differ from how they are now. For one, there is a great deal more description, but thats probably due to our more visually centered entertainment world.

One I noticed was how certain words are spelled. Currently I'm reading A Study in Scarlet, the first story of Sherlock Holmes. In it there is this line:

"Call for me here at noon to−morrow"

Does anyone know why it's to-morrow? And roughly when and why its changed to tomorrow? It's a very small change, and probably insignificant, but I tend to be curious about the small insignificant stuff.

Thanks in advance for any answers.

 

[scotpens]

Spellings of words change over time. Words that were originally hyphenated, like teen-ager, bumble-bee, ice-cream and pot-belly, have either been merged into a single word or split into two words. Native English speakers, and Americans in particular, tend to dislike hyphens.

This trend continues today. How many times have you seen never mind or more so smooshed into one word? Nevermind and moreso look wrong and weird to me, but they may be standard spellings a few years from now.

Also, if you're reading the Sherlock Holmes stories, remember that British usage and spelling differs from that of American English. Those differences haven't changed much in 110 years or so.

 

[Kaziarl]

Is it just for simplicity then? Just that it's easier to write "tomorrow the teenager is going to get ice cream" instead of "to-morrow the teen-ager is going to get ice-cream?"

Seems like a lazy way to do it. lol.

But then I suppose "lol" is as well.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

Also, if you're reading the Sherlock Holmes stories, remember that British usage and spelling differs from that of American English. Those differences haven't changed much in 110 years or so.

Damn colonials ruining the Queen's English

 

[Kaziarl]

Also, if you're reading the Sherlock Holmes stories, remember that British usage and spelling differs from that of American English. Those differences haven't changed much in 110 years or so.

Damn colonials ruining the Queen's English

Yes, damn us farmers and our pitchforks for beating the greatest military force of that time

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

Also, if you're reading the Sherlock Holmes stories, remember that British usage and spelling differs from that of American English. Those differences haven't changed much in 110 years or so.

Damn colonials ruining the Queen's English

Yes, damn us farmers and our pitchforks for beating the greatest military force of that time

So true

 

[Count Zero]

English grammar has changed quite dramatically in the last 150 years or so. There's one Sherlock Holmes story where an encyphered message contains the word 'thou'. I've always found it quite odd how a language can shed the conjugation of verbs so completely and lose important personal pronouns as English has done, and on a global level, too, to boot. Maybe most of it happened before the colonial age but 'thou' was in use well into the colonial age but has disappeared in all the former colonies, too, as far as I know.

 

[Kaziarl]

-th has disappeared as well. Although it crops up under special circumstances sometimes. Shakespear is full of haths, giveths, and other such words. Grammar has done it as well it seems. Which I find kinda funny considering one of my english instructors would always get on us about how important grammar rules are, yet they seem to change so frequently.

 

[Count Zero]

Well, languages are always changing. But we, its speakers, are the ones changing it. So you might be responsible for future grammatic peculiarities. That's why it's a good idea to follow the rules.
Ok, I don't know that many languages so well, but English is the only language I can think of where conjugation changed so dramatically, i.e. vanished, in such a short time. Shakespeare's English is considered Early Modern English, an early version of Modern English, which is the one spoken today. If one compares the versions of German or French from around Shakespeare's time one finds that while there are of course some grammatical differences and especially a lot of orthographical ones to how those languages are written today, the conjugation didn't change. That's what I find so fascinating. I also wonder how it happened. Didn't people feel silly using what looked like the infinitive of the verb? I don't think I could bring myself to speak German that way. So maybe, those conjugation disappeared one by one, but very slowly? Have the practical details of this even been researched?

 

[Goliath]

From what little I remember--I took a German for Reading Knowledge course twenty years ago--German has a few peculiarities of this type as well.

While English speakers have dropped the second-person singular ('thou') in favour of the second-person plural ('you'), haven't German speakers gone one step further, and started using the third-person plural, 'Sie,' in polite conversation?

In English, that would be like saying 'how are they doing' instead of 'how are you doing' (or, for that matter, 'how art thou doing').

 

[Count Zero]

Mmh, I think using 'Sie' in polite conversation is pretty old. Granted, the oldest literary examples I can think of right now are Goethe and Schiller, but I'm pretty sure there was always at least one way of expressing honorifics around. Second person plural was used (and apparently is still in regional use), too, and might be older (or inspired by French).
I think the relation between thou and you (and the corresponding conjugations) is pretty similar to that of du and Sie. In Italian, third person singular is used (though I think that's pretty old-fashioned).
While German will probably lose the honorific form eventually, English sort of lost its informal form of addressing someone instead. I guess it was the polite thing to do.

Except for some differences (which are often regional) German grammar has stayed pretty consistent from Luther's bible translation to today. That's why I find the changes in English so fascinating.