Colin Gorrie posts thus at Dead Language Society:
A man takes a train from London to the coast. He’s visiting a town called Wulfleet. It’s small and old, the kind of place with a pub that’s been pouring pints since the Battle of Bosworth Field. He’s going to write about it for his blog. He’s excited.
He arrives, he checks in. He walks to the cute B&B he’d picked out online. And he writes it all up like any good travel blogger would: in that breezy LiveJournal style from 25 years ago, perhaps, in his case, trying a little too hard.
But as his post goes on, his language gets older. A hundred years older with each jump. The spelling changes. The grammar changes. Words you know are replaced by unfamiliar words, and his attitude gets older too, as the blogger’s voice is replaced by that of a Georgian diarist, an Elizabethan pamphleteer, a medieval chronicler.
By the middle of his post, he’s writing in what might as well be a foreign language.
But it’s not a foreign language. It’s all English.
A good idea, well executed. I admit I suspected a typo in the 1300 passage when I got to “His vois was as þe crying of rauenes, scharpe and schille” — should that last word be “schrille”? — but no, it turns out shrill didn’t enter English for another century or so: c1400 (?c1380) “Wyth a schrylle scharp schout þay schewe þyse worde.” The older word was in fact the OED’s shill ‘Sonorous, resonant, shrill.’ (That entry is from 1914, but the shrill one was revised in 2024, and its etymology section says “Probably an alteration of shill adj., with insertion of ‑r‑, perhaps as a result of association with shrike v. or shream v.”) In the same passage, “Swie!” is the good old Germanic verb ‘to be silent’ (German schweigen). At the end Gorrie explains what’s happened in the later (earlier) bits for those whose linguistic intuition failed them sometime around the fourteenth century. Thanks, Bathrobe!
No comments? Fine. Have some pedantry.
“Yes, it’s the typical English coastal town: the seagulls, the cobblestone streets, the works.”
This threw me, because I’m not used to “the works” as an integral part of a list, but something that comes after the list: “the seagulls, the pie shops, the cobblestone streets. You know, the works!” Another possibility is that “the works” is following a list of only two items: “(1)the seagulls, (2)the cobblestone streets, the works” as opposed to “(1)the seagulls, (3)the cobblestone streets, (3)the works.” But that’s also weird to me, because a list like this feels like it should come in threes.
Anyone else think this was awkward?
Reads fine by me (L2 AmE). “The works” meaning “and everything else typical to this scene” in this context sounds unremarkable to me. “You know, the works!” sounds awkward.
Otherwise, the writing comes off stilted and unnatural for all the eras, but the linguistic effort makes for interesting reading.
My reading is that “the works” here is similar to “etc.” in that both replace a list of unenumerated items. The difference is that “etc.” excludes the previously enumerated items (in this instance, seagulls and cobblestone streets) whereas “the works” includes them. Possible synonyms of “the works” that would likewise include previously enumerated items include “everything” or “all that jazz”.
What Y and mollymooly said; it reads perfectly normally to me.
the writing comes off stilted and unnatural for all the eras
As opposed to the slangy, colloquial Early Modern English we’re used to? He gives the literary sources he used for each form of English.
Apparently there are at least root cognates of shrill elsewhere in Germanic, including Old English – but German schrill is Low German schrell + the meaning adapted to English shrill and only entered the literary language, at least, after 1800…