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Ron asked in Arts & HumanitiesHistory · 3 years ago

How did people talk in the 1500s?

Did they address each other, "hello, how are you doing?" or "good day, sir."?

13 Answers

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  • 3 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.

  • Anonymous
    3 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.

  • 3 years ago

    Good morrow, kind sir!

  • Athena
    Lv 7
    3 years ago

    Um, WHERE?????????

    For example, I do not think the Navajos did, but the Eskimos might have.

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  • Marli
    Lv 7
    3 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

  • 3 years ago

    Assuming you're asking about English, regional accents in England were much more varied than they are now.

  • Anonymous
    3 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

    That's pre-Medieval Ages.

  • 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.

  • Anonymous
    3 years ago

    just the same maybe

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