Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English

language.

This is episode 55, to be or not to be.

In this episode, we're going to continue our look at Old English grammar.

Specifically, we're going to focus on certain verb forms which survived into the modern English

period, in which can be found in the works of Shakespeare and the King James Bible.

These are forms like Thou art and He doth.

So this discussion will sort of piggyback our last episode, in which we explored Old English

pronoun forms which survived until the time of Shakespeare.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is history of

Englishpodcast.com and you can always reach me directly at Kevin at historyofenglishpodcast.com.

And also, let me think those of you who've been kind enough to make a donation to the

podcast at the website.

I always appreciate the support and I sincerely thank those of you who've made contributions.

So let's turn to this episode and the history of English verbs.

Let me begin by noting that there were several aspects of verbs which I wanted to cover in

this episode.

But after preparing the episode, I realized that it was going to be over an hour in length.

And some of the detail in this episode is a bit technical.

So I was afraid it was a bit too much for one episode.

As it turned out, the material divided very neatly into two parts.

So I've decided to present it as two episodes.

...