Posted under General
I have a real problem with this tag. Namely, that none of the posts in it actually depict Middle English, they just use a bunch of old-fashioned words like thou, hast, twine, etc. Middle English is quite different from Modern English, it's not just Modern English with archaic words thrown in.
It needs a rename for accuracy. archaic_speech, maybe?
The conventional name for this kind of language is Early Modern English.
There should also be a tag for Early Modern English ranguage, since a lot of it is wrong.
It's not really splitting hairs over minor differences, this is a pretty big misnomer that doesn't reflect what's actually tagged. In the unlikely case that we would a post with honest-to-God Middle English, the tag would be serving double duty. I fact, I doubt the usefulness of tagging characters saying thou and thee and such, it's not a language, it's just normal words.
I think there should be a tag for both, the sort of very inaccurate Middle English you often see, and actually accurate Middle English, even if only to act as a way to tell the translators which ones actually need translating (not that I think there are many on here that specialize in older forms of English, but it genuinely is something to keep in mind, as actual Middle English is nothing like how it is commonly portrayed in fiction).
To the layman, anything containing the words "thou" or "thy" is Old English, or some kind of non-modern English. I like the idea of a generalized archaic_speech or archaic_language tag so that taggers don't need to know what accurate old/middle English looks like. There's no use in a more specific tag if it's only going to be used for the stuff we see in middle_english_text. Archaic_ranguage might be a good idea too, for some of those.
Seconded. It's safe to assume most people searching on this website don't distinguish between different stages of English, it's mostly a weird, old-fashioned way of writing people learn in class.
That said I don't think something like archaic_ranguage is necessary yet given just how rare artists use archaic English as anything more than word aesthetic (the overlap between artist and historical English expert is very slim).
If the situation ever changes in the future, we can have another discussion.
