A Shakespearian Grammar: an attempt to illustrate some of the differences between Elizabethan and modern English

What it is about

This is a grammar of Elizabethan English built from quotations of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. It has numbered sections (§1 to about §515) on parts of speech and constructions. Each rule is followed by citations that give the play, act, scene and line. The pronoun section (§§205–212) describes irregular personal pronouns: "he" for "him" (§206), "him" for "he" (§208), "I" for "me" in phrases such as "between you and I" (§209), "me" for "I" (§210), "she" for "her" (§211), and "thee" for "thou" (§212). Abbott attributes these to euphony and emphasis rather than to one law, and he notes that "thou" is often left out after a questioning verb. The book has no counts. The evidence is hand-picked quotations; the scan is 544 pages, about 198,000 words.

Ideas

• I1. 3. Pronouns and en/src/emode.rs: write §§205–212 as a closed rule table. Each swap has a trigger: "I" after "and" or "but", "thee" after an unemphatic imperative ("look thee", "hark thee"), "she" for "her" in a subject slot. Apply a rule only when the parse finds no case-consistent subject or object. Measure how many tokens of one play change, run twice.
• I2. Negative control: the same rules must not fire on sentences whose case is already correct, such as "between you and me" or "he saw me". Report the count of false fires, not only the hits.
• I3. Build a gold test set from Abbott's own citations: each quoted line has a play, act and line. Split it into a dev half and a held-out half, and keep the held-out half unused until a release.
• I4. 26. Questions and 8. Word order and phrase structure: the omitted "thou" after a question verb ("wilt thou") is a rule about subject omission. Test it on the questions in the citations before any change to the parser.

For Mova

The chapters are 3. Pronouns, 26. Questions (questions), and 4. Verb endings: -est, -st, -eth, -th for the -est and -eth forms. The code is en/src/emode.rs (the closed table of Early Modern forms) and en/src/morph.rs (morph::archaic). The measure is the rule firing rate on the citations, plus the false-fire count on correct case.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@book{abbott1869shakespearian,
  title = {{A Shakespearian Grammar: an attempt to illustrate some of the differences between Elizabethan and modern English}},
  author = {Abbott, Edwin Abbott},
  year = {1869},
  url = {https://archive.org/details/shakespeariangra00abborich}
}

References

3 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. The following works are referred to by the pages :-^ Ascham's Scholemaster . (Mayor) . London, 1863. The Advancement of Learning . . Oxford, 1640. find
2. Bacon's Essays . . . (Wright) . London, Ben Jonson's Works . . (Gifford) . London, North's Plutarch London, Florio's Montaigne London, • In correcting the proof-sheets I have gained Walker's " Criticisms on Shakespeare." much 1868. 1838. 1656. 1603. froia consulting Mr. find
3. TO FIRST EDITION, Wager, Heywood, Ingelend, &c., and sometimes Beaumont and Fletcher, are quoted from " The Songs of the Dramatists," J. W. Parker, 1855. find

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