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Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?

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Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?

#101

Post by SiVal »

userulluipeste wrote: post #99
fsck--off wrote: post #28

Second person used to be: Singular----|----Plural Thou Ye, You Thee You Thine Yours Thy Your Which correspond to the nominative, objective, and possessive cases accordingly. By the way, the "Ye" is not related to the "Ye" in store signs that say "Ye Olde...". Y was sometimes used by typographers instead of the Old English letter Þ(Thorn), which makes a "Th" sound, so those store signs should be pronounced as " The Ol…

"Thee" is actually "to you" or "for you". (I thought I knew less English than I actually do!)

Almost. It's a difference between subject and object, like I versus me or he versus him.

Thou is the subjective form. "Thou art wise." Thee is the objective form. "My lord did kiss thee in the garden."

Thee can be any object, such as the object of a transitive verb in the above example.

Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?

#102

Post by userulluipeste »

StavrosK wrote: post #78
merkitt wrote: post #65

Greetings from a speaker of a linguistic oddity that doesn't have a universal form of the word "you". My native language -- Sinhalese -- has two forms: written and spoken. The written form, which has a grammar very similar to Latin, does have a universal "you", but the spoken form, which is largely grammer-less except for tense, does not. You literally cannot address someone without knowing their status/relationship…

That's extremely interesting! So people speak in the third person ("did mother want me to get mother's groceries"), or is this a second person still?

It's even more interesting when we remember that in western culture is rude to speak about a present participating person using third person pronouns (- "hey, I'm standing right here!").

Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?

#103

Post by epsylon »

vidarh wrote: post #97
moskie wrote: post #39

This relates well to one of the fascinating things I realized while learning German: the fact that so many English and German words and sounds have phonetic connections, coming from their common Germanic ancestry. For example, the letter "d" in German corresponding to "th" in English: die/der/das -> the drei -> three Donner -> thunder Ding -> thing daher -> therefore and, most relevant to this discussion: du -> thou…

Mix in another Germanic language, and it gets even more fun. Take Norwegian: "the" doesn't have a direct equivalent in modern Norwegian - we add the article as a suffix instead (a car = en bil; the car = bilen), but for the rest: drei -> three / tre Donner -> thunder / torden Ding -> thing / ting daher -> therefore / derfor du -> thou / du Older Danish is even more similar to German, though I don't remember it off ha…

I'm currently learning Norwegian (for fun!) and I didn't expect to see so many lexical similarities between English and Norwegian. As a French (who is already fluent in English), this helps me a lot to memorize the meaning of words: I just have to squint long enough at it until I can recognize the Germanic root and its English descendant :-)

Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?

#104

Post by userulluipeste »

SiVal wrote: post #101
userulluipeste wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Thee" is actually "to you" or "for you". (I thought I knew less English than I actually do!)

Almost. It's a difference between subject and object, like I versus me or he versus him. Thou is the subjective form. "Thou art wise." Thee is the objective form. "My lord did kiss thee in the garden." Thee can be any object, such as the object of a transitive verb in the above example.

Agreed. I just tried to give a simple (but rough) explanation, but when one tries to do that there always is something "lost in translation".

Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?

#105

Post by mattlutze »

levosmetalo wrote: post #96
sabbatic13 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ever have studied comparative-historical linguistics, you know the abbreviation is frequent and necessary. So, the question is, what are the chances that someone familiar with it might use it and not even think about it? Your response assumed it was fully conscious. In any event, we're in the land of acronym pandemonium here, between CS, Data Science, Web terms, etc. PIE is a drop in a big bucket.

Even the ones studying linguistics on some language other than English may not necessarily be used to some random TLA, in the same way most of people in the world would have no idea which topic in schools is called PE in some north american dialect.

What does the Texas Library Association have to do with it? ;)

Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?

#106

Post by eru »

david927 wrote: post #79
davedx wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. So the way we learned the Lord's Prayer, it seems to use the informal: "Thy will be done". But that doesn't correlate with addressing God as "LORD", does it? Edit: I looked this up and found this page: http://brandplucked.webs.com/theeandye.htm It seems to infer that "thou, thee" etc. are only about distinguishing between singular and plural. There's no mention of them being an informal form, at least no…

In German, the informal is used and I was told it's because it is "God the father."

And in parts of America, people call their father Sir.

Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?

#107

Post by mokkol »

moskie wrote: post #39

This relates well to one of the fascinating things I realized while learning German: the fact that so many English and German words and sounds have phonetic connections, coming from their common Germanic ancestry. For example, the letter "d" in German corresponding to "th" in English: die/der/das -> the drei -> three Donner -> thunder Ding -> thing daher -> therefore and, most relevant to this discussion: du -> thou…

Interesting! I think Dutch (Mix between french, german and english) is even closer to English. I am not an expert, just thinking out loud.

  de -> the
  drie -> three (ie and ee got the same pronunciation)
  donder -> thunder
  ding -> ding
  daarvoor -> therefore
  dit -> this
  dat -> that
  donderdag -> thursday
  vader -> father
  moeder -> mother
and a lot more similarities:

  school -> school
  week -> week
  weekend -> weekend
  maand -> month
  vrijdag -> friday
  maandag -> monday
  uit -> out
  goed -> good
  voor -> for
  je -> you
  mij -> my (pronounced the same)
  wij -> we
  auto -> auto
  wagen -> wagen
  kar -> car
And the p to f (I guess also in german)

  slaap -> sleep
  schip -> ship

Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?

#108

Post by eru »

merkitt wrote: post #65

Greetings from a speaker of a linguistic oddity that doesn't have a universal form of the word "you". My native language -- Sinhalese -- has two forms: written and spoken. The written form, which has a grammar very similar to Latin, does have a universal "you", but the spoken form, which is largely grammer-less except for tense, does not. You literally cannot address someone without knowing their status/relationship…

> [...] but the spoken form, which is largely grammer-less [...]

No need to deprecate your mother-tongue. I bet there's plenty of grammar, it's just different from the written form.

(I see a similar inferiority complex with speakers of Singlish here in Singapore. It's a great language, if you ask me.)

Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?

#110

Post by guano___ »

nisse72 wrote: post #44

Swedish has du (singular) and ni (plural). Prior to the "du-reform" in the late 1960's however, ni was also used as a formal singular form, but for the last 40 or so years the formal form has been dropped, leaving ni for plural only. In fact many older people would find it mildly insulting to be addressed singular ni today. Of course there are a few exceptions, most notably when addressing members of the royal family…

I think this a modern misconception of the word ni. Prior to the "du-reform" it was used when talking to subordinates. The polite formal way was to use titles and last names. The new use of ni as a polite pronoun is probably inspired by the rest of europe, as we're trying to be fashionably international.
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