: Re: How to write English in Merlin (TV Series) style? I find the writing style of the show Merlin to be very good, and much better than current/modern English usage. Details about the show can
In The Once and Future King, T.H. White referred to that style as "the High Language", something that his knightly characters would put on like a uniform when speaking to their peers or about their Quest. And, linguistically speaking, it is a High Language (or H dialect, since the term "High Language" carries a value implication relative to the L or M dialects used colloquially or semi-formally). The H dialect of a language is the version of the language one uses when writing formally or giving a formal speech (although the H version of English is eroding lately, being reserved primarily for academic and diplomatic purposes these days). H is, in a lot of ways, a relic of the past, the way people may have spoken two or three generations ago. It has ever been thus -- the King James Bible of 1611, for instance, was deliberately written in a style that would have been current around 1500-1550 so that it would have a ring of antiquity and authority.
The example you cited is similar to early modern English as it was written (not necessarily as it was spoken), but with modern forms of the words. Particularly, the verbs are not conjugated in the 16th- and early 17th-century style (there's nary an est or an eth to be seen), and the pronouns are today's pronouns (thou, thee, thy, thine and ye are not used). The result is an exaggeration of the H dialect of current English. H generally avoids contractions, and the sentence structure is often more complex, with more inversions (Yoda-like constructions) and greater topic prominence (the subject of the sentence is visited twice, once as a noun and again as a pronoun, as in "I, Uther Pendragon, ...").
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