Is there an easy way to substitute the default pronouns? So that I can have sentences such as “Thou sees a white mailbox.” instead of “You see a white mailbox.” I couldn’t find anything useful in this regard except for Fisher’s Custom Library Messages, and I know that’s supposed to be outdated now.
Check out the built-in extension English Language by Graham Nelson, esp. Section 2 - Saying pronouns.
Well-behaved library messages are written with adaptive pronouns like [We], so replacing the rules in that section ought to do what you want.
If you want to be less ad hoc, you could write your own Old English Language extension patterned after English Language.
See §27.9. Extensions can interact with other extensions (the part about “in place of”) and §27.27. Translating the language of play.
I can’t figure out how to disable the English Language extension. How do I do that?
I don’t know. I found §27.27 somewhat lacking in details.
I did:
Section 1 - Old English Pronouns (in place of Section 2 - Saying pronouns in English Language by Graham Nelson)
[cut and paste all of section 2 (minus the header) from English Language here and edit as desired]
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This worked out perfectly.
Thanks very much for the assistance, I’d never have made sense of that otherwise.
Note that the verb conjugations will be more difficult to change. Probably easiest to print the third-person singular form and then a ‘t’, though that’s still more difficult than the built-in systems.
Yeah, I was gonna mention that. Should be “thou seest,” not “thou sees.”
I know, thou knowest, he knoweth. Also, the nominative case of the plural is “ye.” “You” is accusative. But that’s less likely to be needed in a text substitution.
And then you have indicative vs subjunctive forms, thou art vs thou beest/bist, thou wast vs thou wert…
And then the possessives changing ending depending on the start of the next word, thy fruit but thine apple…
Early Modern English is not trivial to substitute into a Standard English project, unfortunately. The best way might be custom Preform grammar if you want to go all-in.
I’m hacking together an absurd medley of Chaucerian-era nouns and modern grammar, so I can live without the correct conjunctives, etc. (It’s going to look strange but play as modern English, in large part because I want the usual command functionality, which means not messing with verbs.)
Thanks for the advice though. And the tips about custom grammar, I expect will turn out to be useful one of these days.