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Old 06-05-2009, 11:32 AM   #9
pdurrant
The Grand Mouse 高貴的老鼠
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Quote:
Originally Posted by hidari View Post
Also quite interesting. The funniest paragraph was

Quote:
And "thee", "thou", and "thither"? I'm shocked that stuff flew back in the fifties. No one talks like a real human being, not even the human beings! I am reminded much of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Remember how everyone, from the jilted husband, the adulterous wife, the preacher-dude, and the five-year-old girl all had the exact same speech patterns? Uneducated and silly hobbits should not speak the same way as old wizards or royalty. Mark Twain had it right; people don't all talk the same way, whether it be in dialect or just simply word choice. It's a lesson that Tolkien should have known himself. And to have just one person speak normally may have made the whole tale easier to digest, because then we would have someone to relate to, even in the slightest bit.
The uses of "thee" and "thou" are there precisely because they are not used in current English, to indicate a more intimate form of speech, in poetry & song, or formal/archaic speech. Hmmm... now I have an electronic copy.

Thee: 34 times.
Thou: 24 times.

Astonishing that he complains about there being no differences in speech patterns just after complaining about one difference that is obvious to anyone.

The only people who use Thee/Thou are:

Elves, in songs
Sam: in a song
The Ents: in a song
Gandalf: quoting Galadriel
Galadriel
Eowyn: In intimate speech to Theoden and later to Aragorn
Faramir: In describing his dream of Boromir's death
Halbarad: quoting Galadriel
Aragorn: quoting Isildur, and in intimate speech with Eowyn
The Nazgul King
Denethor: but only in his last hour.
Mouth of Sauron

This is what Tolkien had to say about them:
Quote:
In one or two places an attempt has been made to hint at these distinctions by an inconsistent use of thou. Since this pronoun is now unusual and archaic it is employed mainly to represent the use of ceremonious language; but a change from you to thou, thee is sometimes meant to show, there being no other means of doing this, a significant change from the deferential, or between men and women normal, forms to the familiar.
Goodness it's nice to have a searchable copy!
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