Live data from Hacker News

How many children had Lady Macbeth?

lifeandletters.substack.com

41–48 of 48 posts

Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?

#41
post #4

This is a type of English usage that bristles my sensibilities when I read it (my sentence parser gives high level warnings, not errors); its most well known example is "Baa baa black sheep have you any wool?" The second part of this sentence may be rephrased as (among others): * Do you have any wool? * Have you got any wool? Either of these I find totally fine, though I personally prefer the latter. Anybody else sha…

To modern ears it sounds like a word order chosen by someone whose first language is completely outside of the Romance/Germanic language families that English straddles. Usage is king though, if a few major influencers started choosing this format on a regular basis then it could probably become normalized in a few years. You'd go from bristling to reluctantly using it to not thinking about it any more.

> To modern ears it sounds like a word order chosen by someone whose first language is completely outside of the Romance/Germanic language families that English straddles.

No, that's perfectly ordinary current word order in many languages, both Germanic and Romance ones.

Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Archaic English bears other similarities to other modern European languages. For example, the verb "like" used to be similar to the Spanish verb "gustar" in that the person that's pleased is the grammatical object and the thing is the subject. For example, this is Shakespeare's Two Gentleman of Verona, Scene 2, Act 4: Host. How now! are you sadder than you were before? How do you, man? the music likes you not. Julia.…

> the music likes you not. > You don't like the music Shouldn't it be "the music like you not"? Since the music is the object and thus no 's' added to the verb for 'you'? Also, wouldn't accusative make the word order arbitrary at the time written?

No, because at that time, music was the subject. The subject-object relationship could be inverted for the verb "like". You can think of it as though "like" were a synonym for "please," with "it likes me" being analogous to "it pleases me." No one uses the word "like" like that nowadays, of course.

Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the music likes you not. > You don't like the music Shouldn't it be "the music like you not"? Since the music is the object and thus no 's' added to the verb for 'you'? Also, wouldn't accusative make the word order arbitrary at the time written?

No, because at that time, music was the subject. The subject-object relationship could be inverted for the verb "like". You can think of it as though "like" were a synonym for "please," with "it likes me" being analogous to "it pleases me." No one uses the word "like" like that nowadays, of course.

Ah ok thanks.

Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?

#45
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of usage is archaic. AFAIK the "have you any wool" formation sounds quite natural in German ("Hast du Wolle?"), though.

Archaic English bears other similarities to other modern European languages. For example, the verb "like" used to be similar to the Spanish verb "gustar" in that the person that's pleased is the grammatical object and the thing is the subject. For example, this is Shakespeare's Two Gentleman of Verona, Scene 2, Act 4: Host. How now! are you sadder than you were before? How do you, man? the music likes you not. Julia.…

I don't buy that. For one thing, Shakespeare's plays were written in modern English. Otherwise, his work would be almost impossible for most people to read and follow today. Middle English and Old English don't look much like modern English, and there is no such thing (or at least no such period) as "Archaic English," except from a modern perspective.

For another, history is full of similar forms ("He loves me, he loves me not") that are probably just as old and absolutely unambiguous.

Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?

#46
Since nobody else has mentioned it, from Wikpedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macbeth

Shakespeare's source for the story is the account of Macbeth, King of Scotland, Macduff, and Duncan in Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), a history of England, Scotland, and Ireland familiar to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, although the events in the play differ extensively from the history of the real Macbeth. The events of the tragedy have been associated with the execution of Henry Garnet for complicity in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

(I'm not sure but I took "differed from the real Macbeth" to suggest that Holinshed's history might also have differed from the real story?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holinshed%27s_Chronicles (there's a good amount in this article about Shakespeare's embellishments)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder_Plot

https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/macbeth.shtml

Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?

#47
post #2

> Shakespeare’s plays, according to Knights, were first and foremost “dramatic poems,” works of literary art unified through metaphor and language, rather than a record of interactions between characters. To treat Macbeth as the final episode in the life of Macbeth was to confuse literature and history, to take the figures of drama for real persons, with biographies that reached back before the beginning of the play…

I don't see it as being "absurd and pointless" when there's a perfectly good answer: it's not in the play. You can imagine what you like, but it's not "canon" in anime terms.

You can imagine what you like, and people do. Stories invite us to imagine not just what's in them, but the world they're set in, including what happened before and after. They leave room for extension with other stories, including prequels and sequels.

This doesn't mean confusing fantasy with real life, either. I think that's getting confused about how people read stories.

Post reply on HN