Talk:God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen

message: No one who has attempted to read ten lines of John Skelton or William Caxton could imagine that "The lyrics are reputed to date back to the 15th century, and are written in Early Modern English". Some notes for an improved article are to be found at this page. --Wetman 02:50, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd like to see some proof of the contention that "merry" should be construed as "strong" in the sense of "mighty."  I can't find any evidence of it in my Concise Oxford. Unless proof is forthcoming, I'm inclined to suggest that the statements questioned by Wetman and myself should be excised. pmr 19:34, 14 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I have today deleted the above-mentioned material, having waited 10 months for proof of its veracity and having found none myself. I have also deleted the following weak, unattributed and unsupported assertion: "It is believed that the song was sung to the gentry by town watchmen who earned additional money during the Christmas season."pmr 10:54, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: That may be nice, but in the missalette, there are changes in the final verse, replacing "brotherhood" with "charity", and "This holytide of Christmas / All others doth deface" is changed to "This holytide of Chistmas / Is filled with heavenly grace".  It seems there's something missing here. --Angeldeb82 16:42, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree about "Wetman"'s comment. This has no strong claim to being one of the earliest Christmas carols, so I have removed some words from the first sentence. Sorry I forgot to sign in. Ogg 19:46, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: With regard to the note on the archaic meaning of deface, purely for illustrative purposes does anyone think it may be worth mentioning that the archaic meaning of "deface" is preserved in heraldry?  In heraldry, a description like "field ver defaced with a lion azure" means that the blue lion is in the fore of the green field.  Would just briefly mentioning the heraldic meaning of "deface" be useful information in the point about "deface"? 150.203.110.172 (talk) 14:54, 3 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Improving the Article

message: Any comment about how Catholic missalettes are replacing the "Ye" with "You"?Delmlsfan 03:41, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: "God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen" is, in fact, how I've always assumed the title is punctuated. Yes, putting the comma after merry would, of course, change the meaning of the "sentence", but it would do that no matter the case of the pronoun. TheScotch (talk) 23:03, 7 July 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I had an early music teacher who was adamant that the title should be "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen."  Apparently, the "merry" is meant to describe the actions of God, something like "May God give you good rest."  In that particular form of older English expression, using "Ye" would still be correct.150.203.110.172 (talk) 14:58, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

text: Let's suppose, however, for the sake of argument, that ye could be used only as an subject pronoun. Would that demonstrate that the correct title substitutes you? What about Bob Dylan's It Ain't Me, Babe? That's undoubtedly ungrammatical, yet it's also undoubtedly the correct title. How can we say that? Well, we know the author, and the author called his song It Ain't Me, Babe. In the case of God Rest, we don't know the author. God Rest is functionally a folk song, and folk songs often exist in variant forms with variant titles. The best argument for ye here is that the song is more commonly known with the ye than without it and has been for a considerable time. (That fact that oldest known source gives you may suggest but doesn't prove that the original title had you--we simply don't know the origin of the song.) TheScotch (talk) 01:16, 23 June 2014 (UTC)

text: The earliest known source documenting the existence of a carol called “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” is a broadsheet published in London around 1760 that included the song as part of a collection of “Three new Christmas carols” (emphasis ours), which suggests the song originated much closer to the mid-18th century than the 15th century. That publication also used the word “you” throughout the lyrics and title rather than the now-archaic “ye,” which may indicate that the latter form was not part of the original and was inserted later to instill the carol with an older, more formal sound.
Lawrie (talk) 03:57, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

text: I read that ye were still used in dialectal Irish English, in both case senses. (As distinctive plural) But original, ye is the nominative. --Universal-Interessierterde (talk (de)) 03:29, 5 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title: "Ye" vs. "You"

message: Surely when it says "God rest ye merry gentlemen", it isn't saying "Quiet down, all you people who are having a merry party", but "I hope you continue to be merry after Christmas". Not "God rest ye, merry gentlemen" but "God rest ye merry, gentlemen." -- God KEEP you merry? 
Andrew Rilstone (talk)  —Preceding comment was added at 00:14, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Rest" 

message: What are the criteria (if any!) for "notable" here? There are 27 entries in the 21st century section alone! That to my eyes looks suspiciously like a "Cover Versions I Like" section. Unless we're going to list every cover version ever made then some sort of control needs to be applied. Loganberry (Talk) 22:10, 13 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Since the song could not possibly be covered--for the reasons I've stipulated above--there should be no section with this or a similar label in this article. Neither is it necessary to list any recording of the piece anywhere else in the article.TheScotch (talk) 23:55, 7 July 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: 11 1/2 years later, shall we substitute "Recordings" in place of "Cover versions"? Cover versions exist when there's an original recording that established the nature of a song to the public, not when there's a hundreds-of-years-old traditional tune. Ikan Kekek (talk) 10:13, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: , I have renamed the section to "Versions by popular music artists", and severely trimmed the details of these versions. The chart positions of these versions do not belong here. Verbcatcher (talk) 04:18, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Excellent! I like this version of the section much better. Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:42, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Notable Cover Versions" 

message: This, in the first paragraph, is not a complete sentence : "In Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas." Presumably the author knew what was meant?  An edit is needed.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.108.118.100 (talk) 09:27, 27 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Poor edit 

message: The article currently says: "Moreover, 'ye' would be grammatically incorrect, as it is a nominative case form."
That's not true, though; "ye" hasn't been exclusively nominative since the 1400s.  Here's what the OED says:
"In the earliest periods of English ye was restricted to the nominative plural. In the 13th cent. it came to be used as a nominative singular [...] When you had usurped the place of ye as a nominative, ye came to be used (in the 15th cent.), vice versa, as an objective singular and plural (= 'thee' and 'you')."
Fortunately, that sentence isn't really relevant to the article anyway, so I've deleted it.
Later in the article, there's a similar claim in a footnote: "The form is 'you', object of 'rest' and not 'ye' which is the archaic subject pronoun. 'Ye' was not used in the earliest instances of the carol."  This note is also unnecessary -- the article already explains that the original form was "you", and it shows two examples from the 1700s (both of which use "you").  Since the footnote is unnecessary and misleading, I've removed it too.  --mconst (talk) 07:35, 10 December 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: According to The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, ed. David Crystal (CUP: 1995), p. 71, first "the distinction between subject and object uses of ye and you...disappeared", then "you became the norm in all grammatical functions and social situations. Ye continued in use, but by the end of the 16th century it was restricted to archaic, religious, or literary contexts." According to both the first edition of the American Heritage English Dictionary and second edition of the Random House Unabridged English Dictionary, ye can be both a subject and an object. (Its usage continues to be "archaic & poetic".) This Wikipedia article currently includes the clause " 'ye' was the nominative form, and thus was nonstandard as the object of a verb". The truth of this assertion would seem to depend on the time period to which the was refers, and the article doesn't specify that. It would have to be centuries before the earliest known reference to the song. Thus the clause appears essentially nonsensical, and I'm deleting it. TheScotch (talk) 09:26, 22 June 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: It was reinstated at some point. Was that a mistake? Ikan Kekek (talk) 10:14, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Grammaticality of "ye" 

message: The second verse is quoted as saying "...The which His Mother Mary/Did nothing take in scorn". How would one paraphrase this line in standard English prose? I can't parse it. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 07:24, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Parsing the second verse 

message: I can't find what would be considered a reliable source that states this, but it appears they did two versions and I think that's significant. One is called "Medieval" and the other is called "Modern".— Vchimpanzee ·  talk · contributions · 20:50, 18 December 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mannheim Steamroller 

message: From Snopes.com: "The song is now widely misunderstood as being addressed to "merry gentlemen"...because the [melody now commonly used with these lyrics] supports that stress pattern."
(The material within the bracket and the brackets themselves are from the Internet source I'm quoting. I didn't put them there. The ellipsis is mine.) This suggests to me that the song published in 1833 may not be the same song as that which appeared on broadsheets in the eighteenth century. TheScotch (talk) 11:37, 22 June 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: it occurred to me that this isn't quite true, there may also be God, rest you merry gentlemen as in "[expletive] sit still you funny guys".  --dab (𒁳) 13:46, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

text: I agree that the melody doesn't really imply any grammatical divisions. It's in 4/4 meter with an upbeat, which creates iambic stress patterns (unstressed, stressed; unstressed, stressed; etc.) The words show the same rhythmic pattern in their natural stresses: God rést you mérry géntlemén, etc. There isn't a break inside the line: i.e., we don't sing it like God rest you (pause) merry gentlemen, but as God rest you merry gentlemen (pause). The existence of a measure break at that point doesn't imply that there's a pause there. The only pause, in songs like this, is at the end of the poetic line. So I'm not sure what on earth Snopes is talking about. — Eru·tuon 20:07, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  music v. lyric 

message: All musicological references I checked say it is among the oldest, either "16th century" or "at least 16th century". 
The point made about two 18th-century prints being given the title of "new Christmas carols" suggesting 18th century origin is thus completely fabricated, on-wiki WP:SYNTH.
# the mere fact that the same song is called a "new carol" in c. 1760, and again a "new carol" in c. 1790 should establish that the "new" in these publications (which were attempts to make money off carollers, not document musical history) is to be taken with a grain of salt. 
#the very earliest record known to Chappell 1859, in the handwriting of James Nares, is entitled "The old Christmas Carol" (not just an old Christmas carol, it's the old Christmas Carol in Nares' time). Now I don't know if Chappell was aware of the 1760 print, and Nares floruit 1730-1780, so Nares' version isn't necessarily much older than the 1760 printed one, but his "old" surely more than cancels any "new" used to hand-wave about then-recent composition).
#also, the "Holofernes" broadsheet, printed, I take it, about 1750, sets its song to "the tune of Tidings of comfort and joy", and Chappell says the Holofernes lyrics fit the carol tune. This means that in 1750, Tidings of comfort and joy was the title used to refer to this carol, and that its melody was strongly associated with it even then. This does not prove 16th or even 17th century origin, but I would say it does prove that in 1750 the carol was widely known, and the "new" versions published later in the 18th century at best included the addition of some extra verses (if we had the text of the 1760 version, we could comare it with the 1775 one (five verses) and the 1833 one (seven verses) and see if it might have introduced new ones, which may be all the advertisement as "new" was intended to convey)
# the references say "16th century", so unless we have any other reference that  disagrees explicitly, there is no call for us to try casting doubt on this on Wikipedia's behalf.
--dab (𒁳) 12:26, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Date estimate

message: Given that the latest dates given in the article are 1927 and 1961 (just a publication date), I think it highly relevant to include uses of the song in the 21st century. Otherwise, the song seems not at all current. I visited the article because I remembered the tune of the latest Walmart commercial was actually this song. This song needs a "popular culture" section to show that the song is still relevant and performed today. My addition of information about the use of the song in advertisements was removed as "trivia". Thoughts? Bod (talk) 00:10, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Popular Culture 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: This article deserves congratulations on getting the comma in the right place in "God rest ye merry, Gentlemen". It could point out that "God rest ye merry" was an old greeting at one time in the English language. Vorbee (talk) 21:52, 7 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Congratulations to Wikipedia

message: It might be of interest here that there is a short story by Ernest Hemingway, first published in 1925 (as a book in 1933), also bearing the title 'God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen'. Though little known, it is included in some collections, such as 'The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway', New York 1936. 92.79.101.164 (talk) 14:52, 23 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Ernest Hemingway Story