How do you say 'where are you' in Elizabethan English?

Answer 1

Shakespeare wrote in Modern English, although in an early form of it called Elizabethan English. Shakespeare would have said "Where are you?" as "Where are you?". If he was talking to more than one person, that is the only way he could have said it. If he was talking to one person, and that person was a child, a pet, an inferior or a lover, he might have used the older pronoun "thou" and its forms. Thus "Judith and Susannah, where are you?" but possibly "Judith, where art thou?"

If you are thinking that "where are you" is the same as "wherefore art thou" as said by Juliet in Romeo and Juliet then you are WRONG. "Wherefore" means "why", not "where". "Wherefore art thou Romeo" means "What are you Romeo for?", which is not the same thing as "What are you, Romeo?"

Answer 2

In Elizabethan English, the phrase "where are you" would be expressed as "Where art thou." This is due to the use of "thou" as the informal singular pronoun for "you" in that time period. Additionally, the verb "art" is the second person singular form of the verb "to be" in Elizabethan English.

Answer 3

Ellizabethan English is still Modern English and all of the most important words were exactly the same then as they are now. Elizabethans just said "the", no differently to the way we do now. In all Shakespeare's works he uses "the".

Answer 4

"Welcome". Shakespeare uses no other phrase, nor do his contemporaries, and Shakespeare uses the word hundreds and hundreds of times.

He uses it in Hamlet seventeen times alone. And it's the same in every single play.

Answer 5

Do you mean, what are some Elizabethan interjections? Something like "Crap! I dropped the boiling water on my foot!" (substitute the four-letter word of your choice for "crap!" if you like)?

Well, they would usually use swear words which were derived from religious words. Hermia in Midsummer Night's Dream says "O spite! O Hell!". You hear a lot of "Marry" which is of course the Virgin Mary. In Henry V (lots of swearing here), Fluellen (who is Welsh) says "By Chesu!", whereas Macmorris (who is Irish) says "By Chrish!" "By the Mass" is a common exclamation.

The favourite kind of swearing was to swear by God's attributes or even better, by his body parts. These swears got worn down and Shakespeare uses them in all of the different forms. "God's wounds" became "'Ods Nouns" (Mistress Quickly, Merry Wives) which became "'swounds" (Hamlet) which became "'zounds" (Hotspur in Henry IV Part 1). "God's Lid" (Pandarus, Troilus and Cressida; it means his eyelid), became "'Od's Lid" which became "'slid" (Sir Andrew, Twelfth Night). By a similar process "God's Blood" becomes "'Sblood" (Falstaff), and "God's light" becomes "'slight" (Sir Andrew). "God's body" (which is also 'ods body and 'sbody of course) was usually made less fierce by adding the diminutive suffix "-kins" making it "God's bodikins" (Hamlet, thence the familiar 'Ods Bodkins).