Have you ever gotten criticism on a story for making Luna say, "Prithee, dear sister! We doth requireth moren of yon awesome tea!" Well you should, if you wrote that. That's terrible, and Luna does NOT speak like that. But it's not your fault, it's just hard to write good Luna lines.
Well, luckily for you over-stressed amateur authors, someone (namely me) has taken the time to research this for you! You can find it all in Luna for Dummies, a simple, easy-to-understand guide to writing Early Modern English Luna-style (not Old English, mind you). Check it out, learn something, and let me know what you think.

4026525
There's a reason that people are more likely to use Early Modern English with Luna: it leaves her with a distinctive speaking voice, rather than a completely boring one. And there's a reason she uses modern pronunciation rather than the actual pronunciation of the time - people in the early 1600s sounded very strange to modern ears. It is a translation convention, but a useful one.

Another issue: the letter y was never pronounced "th". The letter which was pronounced "th" was thorn (Þ, þ). Þ has long since dropped out of our language, but back at the time of the invention of the printing press, it was still used. However, the printing press often did not have a character for Þ, so they used y in the place of Þ. "Ye merry gentleman" is pronounced correctly with a y sound, while "ye old tavern" is actually "Þe old tavern" or "the old tavern".

Thee is the oblique form of "thou". while ye was a nominative form of "you". The reason that the Bible used thou and you was because thou was the singular form of address while "you" was the plural form; however, by the 1600s, thou had become insulting to folks and was falling out of the language and being entirely replaced by "you". The people who were translating the Bible deliberately misused "thou" and "you", using "thou" (and its derivatives) for singular address while using "you" for addressing more than one person, regardless of whether or not that was, in fact, correct (thou was informal and used to address inferiors at that point, while you was polite and used to address groups of people; in the very distant past, thou was always used for singular second person and you always for plural, but that distinction ended up getting changed into the t-v distinction after the Normans invaded Britain in 1066; by the 1600s, the t-v distinction applied to thou-you). The reason why they did this was to preserve the distinction between the singular form of second person address and the plural form of second person address found in the original version of the Biblical texts - it was a translation convention meant to keep the work closer to the original meaning.

Note also that "thou" changes how verbs are conjugated - thou had its own set of verb conjugation rules distinct from those which govern "you". If you're actually interested in using "thou" correctly, your best bet is to consult the Internet about Early Modern English.

I wrote a big long post about the subject of the t-v distinction a while ago after I wrote a story which made use of it.

Interesting stuff. Mostly for my Luna dialogue I try to just remember a few rules like: No contractions, no slang, don't be afraid to use big words and complex sentence structures, etc. I find a big part of writing Luna comes from just the mentality. The attitude. I find things like Fall of the Crystal Empire very helpful. Luna has more meaningful dialogue in just that one fan made video than the entire canon series combined.

Oh THANK GOD!

BTW, I agree with the article.

4026669

the letter y was never pronounced "th". The letter which was pronounced "th" was thorn (Þ, þ).

You know, I actually knew that. If I actually took notes, I could tell you the name of the guy who made the decision. My fault. I think I mixed up a fact or two assuming I knew it, and then I tried to simplify the whole concept into the "y=th" idea, which is wrong. Thank you, and thanks for the additional details. When I'm motivated enough, I'll go through and implement them.

That was really fascinating. Thank you for sharing that.