How can I find out how people during the Arthurian times spoke?

Question

Sixth century to be exact. I'm writing an essay from the point of view of someone who lives in King Arthur's time.

Can you, if you can, give me a general outline or example of how they talked and if possible any websites that i can use.

Answer 1

It would probably be Old English/Anglo-Saxon, which is so far from Modern English that is won't even be intelligible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English... has the Lord's Prayer in Old English and a translation, just to show how different it is. And a link to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Wl-OZ3br... if you want to get some idea of how it sounds. Edit: the "Related Videos" have other examples of spoken Old English.

If you just want to do it for effect, you'd be better off using Middle English, which wouldn't be historically accurate, but it would provide atmosphere.

Answer 2

they would be speaking a germanic dialect, probably with some latin mixed in it.  it wouldn't be "ye olde...", that would be much later.  so that leaves you with some predecessor of german, or latin (the everyday version, which sort of evolved into the various romance languages.)  so, there isn't anything that even remotely resembles modern english, sorry.

If you want to try middle english (the ye olde stuff), (more like 1100's and a bit later) I believe that there are some sites that list modern-middle english words.  I had a friend who was going to do a similar thing, though i don't know if he ever followed through.  so, your essay would technically be historically inaccurate, but it would certainly add some flair if you go through with it.  I'm sure your teacher would appreciate the effort, and you might even want to put a little disclaimer, so you differentiate yourself from the stereotype of assuming middle english is old english.

Answer 3

If your person who lived King Arthur’s time was an Angle, or Saxon, or Jute, indeed that person would normally be talking in a very old version of Old English, possibly even something one might wish to call Anglo-Frisian or Ingævonic.

However Arthur himself, according to tradition, was of British origin and fought against the invading English. He would have spoken Early Welsh. Very little of this survives. The poem Y Gododdin would have originally been in Early Welsh, but the version that has come down to us has been partly modernized into Old Welsh. See http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext06/gd... .

You can find a book which is “An Introduction to Early Welsh” at http://www.archive.org/details/introduct... .

Note that at least some Britons especially in the church, would have spoken Latin. But the only Latin dating from near the tradition time and place of Arthur is the “De Excidio Britanniae” by Gildas, which you can read in translation here: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/gil... .

Answer 4

If your intention is to use *actual* period English, then I am sincerely impressed.  The sixth century corresponds to Old English, which is basically unintelligible to a modern speaker.  It's a case-marked language, like German, which means that the sentence structure will not resemble modern English at all.  Below is the first line of the Lord's Prayer, "Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name":

Fæder ure thu  the   eart  on  heofonum, si   thin nama  gehalgod.

Father our thou that  art   in   heaven,     be  thy  name  hallowed.

If you want a better example, go to your library and try to find a copy of Beowulf - the original, unmodified text - with translations into modern English.  You can also find a fairly comprehensive Old-Modern English dictionary here:  http://www.northvegr.org/lore/oldenglish...

Good luck with your essay!