Yahoo Answers is shutting down on May 4th, 2021 (Eastern Time) and beginning April 20th, 2021 (Eastern Time) the Yahoo Answers website will be in read-only mode. There will be no changes to other Yahoo properties or services, or your Yahoo account. You can find more information about the Yahoo Answers shutdown and how to download your data on this help page.
Trending News
How did people talk in the 1500s?
Did they address each other, "hello, how are you doing?" or "good day, sir."?
13 Answers
- lenpol7Lv 73 years ago
'Good day, sir' would have been 'God be with you this day, Sire/My Lord'.
Read either Shakespeare or the Authorised Version (King James)
Version of the Bible! The English they are both written , is the mode of speech in the sixteenth century.
- Anonymous3 years ago
They would certainly not say how are you doing, they would not have understood that expression.They may have said good morrow to you, meaning good day, and they would have addressed the person by name, mistress brown,mr brown.
- AthenaLv 73 years ago
Um, WHERE?????????
For example, I do not think the Navajos did, but the Eskimos might have.
- How do you think about the answers? You can sign in to vote the answer.
- MarliLv 73 years ago
We don't know exactly how they talked; but we have examples of how they addressed each other in writing. Letters, inventories, instructions from masters to servants, trial transcripts, petitions, books like Utopia and A History of Richard the Third, The Book Called The Governor, The Book of the Courtier, Hall's Chronicle, the "protestant" writings like The Obedience of a Christian Man, the various translations of the Bible, the invective that enemies in religion hurled at each other, and other writings show the words they used and the sentence structures.
The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England by Ian Mortimer.
How to Be a Tudor by Ruth Goodman.
Shakespeare's plays (or Ben Jonson's or Beaumont and Fletcher's) Also the Corpus Christi plays, especially the scenes between the commoners, and between labourers and their"betters".
King Henry's letters to Anne Boleyn
- Gawain ofLv 73 years ago
Assuming you're asking about English, regional accents in England were much more varied than they are now.
- Anonymous3 years ago
Shakespeare, writing during the 1500s, wrote his plays in the vernacular of the day. You can get an excellent idea of living English in those times from reading Shakespeare;and, British productions of Shakespeare are remarkably close to the way their ancestors actually spoke.
- 3 years ago
Common speech would have been very different. One linguist thinks that English would have been spoken in an accent resembling a Scottish brogue, but the grammar and many of the words would be unrecognizable to us. It's tough to say, since there are no audio recordings, but common speech would be NOTHING like Shakespeare.
- Anonymous3 years ago
just the same maybe