Thee and thou
Roland Carn muses on how George Fox might have spoken
We were eight of us in the car. A few weeks earlier we had all moved into one house to start an intentional, open, Quaker community in Pittsburgh. We had heard about Conservative Friends in Ohio and wanted to see what they were like. Friends welcomed us, wearing Quaker dress. ‘Welcome Friends,’ they said. ‘We are pleased to see thee. Will thou come this way. Judith will take the women to Women’s Meeting and Sam will take the men to Men’s Meeting.’
These are not re-enactors playing at being old-fashioned early Quakers. They are real. They live like this – all the time. We are very impressed with the warmth, intimacy and depth of Quaker experience. We are impressed with the Conservative Friends’ language and decide to use it ourselves.
At first it feels strange. We’re playing a game, but it’s fun. ‘Hast thee brought thy laundry down?’ ‘What will thee cook for dinner?’ ‘Dost thee need help with that?’ Soon it becomes a habit. We draw together as friends and become a community – as early Quakers must have been.
At first we were young singles from different backgrounds and experiences. Many Friends and neighbours came to Wednesday potlucks. The second house included children and a retired couple. The community grew to five houses. My wife and I met (with a little help from our friends) and our first daughter was born there. We continued using ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ among ourselves, but hesitated to use it with others in our daily lives. Some of us married (and divorced) or moved away and others joined. The community survived for about twenty years.
At Britain Yearly Meeting Gathering in Coventry this year, Judith Roads, in a special interest group, recited well-known passages by George Fox and James Nayler, taken from Quaker faith & practice, as seventeenth-century Friends might have spoken them. The result was illuminating and electrifying. The passages were at once more homely and informal, and one had a deeper understanding and sense of oneness with the writer. I was transported back to Pittsburgh’s Quaker Community: to that same sense of deep belonging in a Quaker experience.
I was amazed at how easy it was to follow along and read the passages for oneself – and what fun. I didn’t get it right all the time but it was my first attempt! Short words were shorter than ours. So speech was faster, knocking ten minutes off a play. There were no diphthongs, and long words like ‘conscience’ were given three full syllables: con-sci-ience. Speaking was more relaxed. It came from the chest in a deeper, more powerful tone – in sharp contrast to the news reader or sports commentator shrieking and screaming to get my attention. Today thee speaks with a tight neck and tight vocal chords, from thy head, not thy chest – reflecting the tension of thy life.
Of course, thee can’t be sure of the actual pronunciation: thee had no recording devices 300 years ago. As always, scholars differ. There were differences between speakers, regions and accents. A speaker saying a word in a different context, pronounced it differently. The closest thee can get to how Fox might have spoken comes from the clues in Shakespeare 100 years before Fox.
Judith took her pronunciation from the work of Shakespearian scholar David Crystal and actor Ben Crystal, working from rhymes, puns, jokes and pentameter rhythms in the plays and sonnets. Thee can hear Hamlet’s famous ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy in Shakespearian pronunciation on the website below.
I hope thee enjoys it. I did.
Further information: http://bit.ly/2xrcRRw
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