Archaism

[Johnyxxx]

Hello,

Can anybody tell me what historical period the author tries to imitate in his archaic language?

"Ye Hogge which ye Almighty alone hath power upon. If in sleep or in ye hour of danger ye hear the voice of ye Hogge, cease ye to meddle. For ye Hogge doth be of ye outer Monstrous Ones, nor shall any human come nigh him nor continue meddling when ye hear his voice, for in ye earlier life upon the world did the Hogge have power, and shall again in ye end. And in that ye Hogge had once a power upon ye earth, so doth he crave sore to come again. And dreadful shall be ye harm to ye soul if ye continue to meddle, and to let ye beast come nigh. And I say unto all, if ye have brought this dire danger upon ye, have memory of ye cross, for of all sign hath ye Hogge a horror."

The Hog, W.H.Hodgson, 1912

Thank you very much.

 

[GoesStation]

I think the author was aiming for early 17th century, echoing the language of the King James Version of the Bible.

 

[bhaisahab]

"Ye Hogge which ye Almighty alone hath power upon. If in sleep or in ye hour of danger ye hear the voice of ye Hogge, cease ye to meddle. For ye Hogge doth be of ye outer Monstrous Ones, nor shall any human come nigh him nor continue meddling when ye hear his voice, for in ye earlier life upon the world did the Hogge have power, and shall again in ye end. And in that ye Hogge had once a power upon ye earth, so doth he crave sore to come again. And dreadful shall be ye harm to ye soul if ye continue to meddle, and to let ye beast come nigh. And I say unto all, if ye have brought this dire danger upon ye, have memory of ye cross, for of all sign hath ye Hogge a horror."

The "Ye" highlighted was pronounced "The". The "Y" being the Anglo-Saxon letter "Thorn".

 

[Skrej]

Here's my long answer, because I just love this kind of stuff:

'Ye' was used in Middle English (around 1150 to 1500 A.D) and Early Modern English (late 15th -late 17th century A.D.) as the 2nd person plural pronoun. 'Thou' was the 2nd person singular, and both have been replaced by 'you' in modern English.

'Ye' is sometimes mistakenly used to represent how 'the' was written in Early Modern English, but that's incorrect.

It was actually written as 'þe', using the letter þ (called a 'thorn'), which was leftover from Old English, which in turn had borrowed it from Norse and other Gothic scripts. Due to some stylistic representations of fonts, and variations in orthographic representations of the sound, people have mistaken the þ for a 'y'.

Later of course the 'thorn' replaced was by the digraph 'th'. Today it's sometimes phonetically represented as the Greek theta, θ or a ð, (called an 'eth').

Finally, neither should be confused with 'thee', which was the 2nd person singular objective pronoun in Early Modern English.

You'll notice that the sample text uses 'ye' interchangeably for 'the' and 'you', but also for 'your', which 'ye' never represented even in older forms of English.

Also 'doth' is an archaic form of 'does' from Early Modern English.

That silent 'e' and doubling of consonants was typical of the spelling conventions of Early Modern English as well, although at that point spelling was nowhere close to standardized. Shakespeare himself would spell the same word differently even in the same sentence. Curiously, the author only attempts it on the single word 'hog'

So, I'd say it's a (bad) approximation of Early Modern English.

So my short answer is: mid 1500's to mid 1600's.

 

[bhaisahab]

The following were abbreviations during Middle and Early Modern English using the letter thorn:

• – (þ[SUP]e[/SUP]) a Middle English abbreviation for the word the
• – (þ[SUP]t[/SUP]) a Middle English abbreviation for the word that
• – (þ[SUP]u[/SUP]) a rare Middle English abbreviation for the word thou (which was written early on as þu or þou)
• (y[SUP]s[/SUP]) an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word this
• – (y[SUP]e[/SUP]) an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word the
• – (y[SUP]t[/SUP]) an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word that

Wikipedia