Just wondering this because of the stereotype (if you can call it that) that English was spoken like this hundreds of years ago. Apparently, you add "-eth" at the end of every verb, so "speak" would become "speaketh," although it's the other way around because "speak" is the modern word.
Is there any truth to this? How did it originate? It reminds me of the stereotype that Americans have of Spanish speakers: every word in Spanish ends with "-o." And that's clearly not true, so is this "-eth" thing something similar? If it's true, why didn't they just drop the "-eth" in the first place if every word has it?
The "-eth" ending is a conjugational ending of the third person singular present indicative of regular verbs in Early Modern English--it exists in no noun and in no other form of the verb. It is a remnant of a Middle English conjugational ending for the third person singular in southern dialects of the language, where the third person singular present indicative of regular verbs ended in "-eth"--in northern dialects the third person singular present indicative ended in "es." The northern dialect form displaced the southern form for this particular ending sometime in Early Modern English, resulting in our usual conjugation of the verb--thus "goeth" was replaced in the south by "goes," which eventually became pronounced the way we pronounce it now, besides being just spelled the same. Similarly the older second person singular present indicative verbal ending was either "-es" (in the north), "-est" (in the Midlands) or "-st" in the south--this archaic form is preserved in a few of Shakespeare's lines but was dying out at the same time, as was the archaic third person singular ending
The -th ending was used on verbs with third-person singular subjects. (In other words, sentences or phrases starting with he, she, or it.) It derived from the Old English/Anglo-Saxon letter ð, which represented a "th" sound.
Old English was a highly inflected language, which means that meaning is encoded in endings, showing who was doing an action, how many people/things were doing it, and so on. Over time, English lost most of its inflections and now uses word order to encode meaning instead. Because endings are how meaning was coded, it wasn't possible to drop them because you wouldn't know whether the verb was a statement, command, or a hypothetical, or who or how many people/things it was referring to. (It worked much like Latin or Classical Greek in these respects.)
-Eth existed in Old and Middle English and was still being used by Shakespeare's time. He has a line in Henry VI, Part II that goes: "With her, that hateth thee and hates us all," showing both the old and modern conjugations were in use. So while this ending existed into the 1600s, it was already falling into disuse and eventually disappeared in Modern English.
Wikipedia has an overview of Old English grammar that will give you a sense of all the different endings for verbs, nouns, and other parts of speech, all of which were critical in understanding even the most basic sentence.
Yes. But, to be more precise, English in history is divided into Old English (until the Norman Conquest), Middle English (from 1100 to 1500ish) and Modern English (from 1500ish until today). During these periods, the predominant dialects (the variants of English surviving in the most sources) are not the dialects from which our Modern English is derived.
In Old English, the present second singular ending would be -st (helpest), the third singular would be -ð (helpeð), and the plural would be -að (helpað). (Courtesy of the famous Old English Magic Sheet, available online!) In Middle English, these present singular endings were retained, but start to decay in the 1500s, and don't survive today.