Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

elizabethandrama.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–169 of 169 posts

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#161

Post by TinkersW »

recursive wrote: post #42
graemep wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shakespeare is modern English and perfectly comprehensible. Beowulf is not. Yes, there are some words that have changed (like his example of "character") but those are few. There are always difficulties. There are lots of words that have different meanings in British, American and other forms of English ("bum", "fag", etc.), or that are offensive in some places but not others, different usages..... The way to make Sh…

> Shakespeare is modern English and perfectly comprehensible My personal experience is inconsistent with this. I'm not an English expert, but I'm a native speaker. I generally am able to communicate with people using the language. Despite these qualifications, I was hard-pressed to find any lines that I could make sense of in Shakespeare. This is not a criticism of the material. Also it's not really a self-criticism…

I am also a native english speak and didn't find Shakespeare difficult to read in High School, thought I did read books on my own time--more than most.

It helps to have an annotated version that explains the occasional phrase that is no longer used.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#162

Post by TinkersW »

recursive wrote: post #60
karaterobot wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

McWhorter's a fun, cantankerous guy, always ready with a hot take. This one is wrong. We do have access to Shakespeare! Even ignoring productions, which are immediately understandable, a regular person, with no special education, and only a tiny bit of patience, can just sit down and read all of Shakespeare, and understand it. Right now! They may have to look up some of the words, but that's exactly what people have…

> a regular person, with no special education, and only a tiny bit of patience, can just sit down and read all of Shakespeare, and understand it. Right now! This just is not my experience. Today, I spent about 20 minutes trying to understand the first sentence of "Romeo and Juliet". When I get to "From ancient grudge break to new mutiny," I cannot reconcile any dictionary definition of "mutiny" with anything this fra…

Without looking anything up, I did not find that phrase confusing ..

"From ancient grudge break to new mutiny"

My immediate read is that the two houses have an ancient grudge, and there will be a change in status involving mutiny, in this case the love between Romeo and Juliette(their houses are enemies so you could see this as a form of mutiny).

Who can say if this is what Shakespeare meant, but the phrase didn't seem hard to follow at all, I didn't have to think about it.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#163

Post by hnfong »

joshstrange wrote: post #116
hnfong wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Markest thou well, good sir, thy words are naught But foolish prattle. Forsooth, for many a year, The younglings of sixteen winters have grasped This very material with ease and little fear. If thy premise held water, then, by the stars, A woeful decline in linguistic arts Would manifest itself in tests of old, A downward trend that would not be untold. But nay, 'tis not the youth that falter here, But rather thou, d…

If ever I was ok with an AI generated comment on HN this is it. I’m firmly in the “the cognitive load to read/understand Shakespeare far outweighs leaving it in the ‘original’ form”-camp and this further confirms my view point. I love reading, I always have, but I never loved reading Shakespeare and probably never will. I maintain that teachers do their students a massive disservice by shoving dry or hard to understa…

I didn't expect so many eager responses to my AI generated copy-pasta!

Oddly on topic, I've recently experimented with shoving classics into an LLM to "modernize" the language and see what comes out on the other side. ( https://github.com/hnfong/gutchopper/ )

And I don't know whether the results should be considered good or not:

  It's a fact: when a single guy with a fat bank account moves into a new neighborhood, he's basically a prize to be won by one of the local girls.
(Pride and Prejudice, Butchered Version)

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#164

Post by recursive »

TinkersW wrote: post #162
recursive wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a regular person, with no special education, and only a tiny bit of patience, can just sit down and read all of Shakespeare, and understand it. Right now! This just is not my experience. Today, I spent about 20 minutes trying to understand the first sentence of "Romeo and Juliet". When I get to "From ancient grudge break to new mutiny," I cannot reconcile any dictionary definition of "mutiny" with anything this fra…

Without looking anything up, I did not find that phrase confusing .. "From ancient grudge break to new mutiny" My immediate read is that the two houses have an ancient grudge, and there will be a change in status involving mutiny, in this case the love between Romeo and Juliette(their houses are enemies so you could see this as a form of mutiny). Who can say if this is what Shakespeare meant, but the phrase didn't se…

Congrats

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#165

Post by xenadu02 »

jfengel wrote: post #31
kens wrote: post #13

The well-known linguist John McWhorter argues that Shakespeare's plays should be translated into modern English since they are written in a language that we effectively no longer speak. "Indeed, the irony today is that the Russians, the French and other people in foreign countries possess Shakespeare to a much greater extent than we do, for the simple reason that unlike us, they get to enjoy Shakespeare in the langua…

Shakespeare is modern English. Linguists describe it as "Early Modern English". It's contemporaneous with the King James Bible, which is still widely read, without translation. The difficulty with Shakespeare isn't that it's in Elizabethan English, but that it's in poetry. The Russians and French have strong poetic cultures. They enjoy reading poetry, and the challenge of writing it, including translation. That just…

Shakespeare only really works for me in original pronunciation. The rhyme scheme makes sense, the alliteration comes back... even some nonsensical lyrics become obvious jokes.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#166

Post by morgango »

kens wrote: post #13

The well-known linguist John McWhorter argues that Shakespeare's plays should be translated into modern English since they are written in a language that we effectively no longer speak. "Indeed, the irony today is that the Russians, the French and other people in foreign countries possess Shakespeare to a much greater extent than we do, for the simple reason that unlike us, they get to enjoy Shakespeare in the langua…

| You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#167

Post by linearrust »

kens wrote: post #13

The well-known linguist John McWhorter argues that Shakespeare's plays should be translated into modern English since they are written in a language that we effectively no longer speak. "Indeed, the irony today is that the Russians, the French and other people in foreign countries possess Shakespeare to a much greater extent than we do, for the simple reason that unlike us, they get to enjoy Shakespeare in the langua…

> The well-known linguist John McWhorter argues that Shakespeare's plays should be translated into modern English since they are written in a language that we effectively no longer speak.

Shakespeare is modern enough to be understandable by any english speaker. What shakespeare requires isn't a translation but annotation for the cultural/historical/etc references and archaic words.

> "Indeed, the irony today is that the Russians, the French and other people in foreign countries possess Shakespeare to a much greater extent than we do, for the simple reason that unlike us, they get to enjoy Shakespeare in the language they speak."

I don't think you can truly enjoy shakespeare in a language other than english. After all, the value in shakespeare isn't the plot, but the language.

> However, we would never complain a translation of Beowulf 'isn’t Beowulf'

I would. But it isn't worth learning old english just to read a book. It is worth reading a bit of annotation for shakespeare.

Certainly this 'well-known linguist' isn't equating the difficulty of reading beowulf with hamlet?

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#168

Post by vidarh »

Suppafly wrote: post #152
carterdmorgan wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can argue that Shakespeare is comprehensible to a modern English speaker, but I don't think you can argue that it's modern English. The different "you" forms alone are enough to make it difficult to understand for most modern speakers.

Different 'you' forms?

Thou, thee, ye [,thy, thine] are variants of 2nd person pronouns.

"You" used to be the formal plural form.

All of these have different connotations and/or subtly different meanings, and context will affect if they are to be taken at face value or are e.g. sarcastic (I've not read enough Shakespeare to recall if he made use of that)

[Thy/thine is your/yours and which is right depends on if it's before a vowel or consonant...]

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#169

Post by Affric »

recursive wrote: post #88
Affric wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. 1567–1667† Discord, contention, tumult; a state of discord; a dispute, quarrel. Frequently in in (a) mutiny, at (a) mutiny. Obsolete.[1] Mutiny in this case means as defined above. An old grudge is boiling over. Note that it is highly unlikely for the grudge to literally be ancient how I would think of that word today. “Civil blood” Is a double meaning a reference to the prestige of the families and brings into…

> Part of the magic of communication is deliberate double meaning. It is not a well defined API. In order to appreciate a double meaning, I'd have to have enough basis of understanding to even be able to recognize it. > As someone with a disability who teaches computer science to students with disabilities (and without), your problems reading Shakespeare do not sound like those of people that come to mind when I read…

100% it’s over thinking it. The double meaning is an instructive example. You can’t know about the double meaning a priori. It’s foreshadowing.

It’s a play from a time when there was no television. No radio. No internet. People would have seen it multiple times and not expected to understand everything during their first watch. Shakespeare straight up invents words.

Post reply on HN