Actually, if you were really interested, words like "thee" and "thou" and many others you would see in some of Shakespeare's plays are considered Modern English. So they may be a little antiquated, but not old english. By the way, we speak modern english as well. Middle English is a mixture of french/latin/german/scandinavian. Middle is somewhat recognizalbe as english and readable if you have some knowledge of those other languages, though your pronunciation may be off. Old English is totally unrecognizable as being related to english at all. It is more akin to old scandinavian and teutonic, with letters not even in the english alphabet today. Middle english would be something like Chaucer's Cantebury Tales and old english would be something like Beowulf in its original form. Just fyi. Always good to be informed.
|