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Thou

Encyclopedia : T : TH : THO : Thou

For other uses, see Thou (disambiguation)}}}.
Thy redirects here; for other uses of thy or THY see Thy (disambiguation).
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Most modern English speakers think of "thou" as a relic of Shakespeare's day
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Most modern English speakers think of "thou" as a relic of Shakespeare's day

The word thou (pronounced IPA [ðaʊ] with "th" as in "the") is a second person singular pronoun of the English language. Thou is the nominative case form; the oblique/objective (functioning as both accusative and dative) is thee, and the genitive is thy or thine.

In standard modern English thou is little used. It continues to be used only in certain contexts:

Contents

Etymology

Thou originates from Old English þú, and ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European *tu, with the expected Germanic vowel lengthening in open syllables. Thou is therefore cognate with Latin, Sanskrit, French, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Irish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Portuguese, and Romanian tu or tú, modern German, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish du, Russian ты (ty), Slovene ti, Hindi, and Persian تُو (to). A cognate form of this pronoun exists in almost every other Indo-European language.

Usage

When thou was in common use, personal pronouns had standardized declension according to the following table.
    Nominative Objective Genitive Possessive
1st Person singular I me my / mine1 mine
  plural we us our ours
         
2nd Person singular informal thou thee thy / thine1 thine
  plural or formal singular ye you your yours
         
3rd Person singular he / she / it him / her / it his / her / his (its)2 his / hers / his (its)2
  plural they them their theirs

1 In a deliberately archaic style, the forms with /n/ are used before words beginning with a vowel sound (thine eyes). This practice is irregularly followed in the King James Bible; it may have emerged as a later nicety. Otherwise, thy and thine correspond with my and mine; that is, the first is attributive (my/thy goods), and the second predicative (they are mine/thine).

2 In the early Middle English period, his was the genitive case of it as well as he. Later, the neologism its became common. Both can be found in the 1611 King James Bible.

Conjugation

Verb forms used after thou generally end in -st or -est in the indicative mood in both the present and the past tenses. These forms are used for both strong and weak verbs:

Examples (infinitive, present, past)

The e's enclosed in parentheses are optional; this was typical of early English spelling which had not yet been standardized.

A few verbs have irregular thou forms:

Most of these verb forms are very similar or identical to German and Frisian (which is considered one of the closest languages to English) conjugations, e.g.:

Middle English Frisian German Modern English
Thou hast Do hast Du hast You have
Thou goest Do giest Du gehst You go
Thou dost Do dochst Du tust You do
Thou be'st (variant of art) Do bist Du bist You are
She hath Sy hat Sie hat She has
What hast thou? Wat hasto? Was hast du? What do you have?
What hath she? Wat hat sy? Was hat sie? What does she have?

These endings are related to the Indo-European "s" and "t". (Cf. Russian знаешь, znayesh, you know; знает, znayet, he knows)

The endings in -(e)st are omitted as usual in the subjunctive and imperative moods, except that thou wert is used in the past tense of the subjunctive:

If thou be Johan, I tell it thee, right with a good advice . . .;
Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart . . .
I do wish thou wert a dog, that I might love thee something . . .

Later usage

Most modern writers have no experience using thou in daily speech; they are therefore vulnerable to what would originally have been considered solecism through the misuse of the traditional verb forms.

The most common "mistake" in artificially archaic modern writing is the use of the old third person singular ending -eth with thou, for example thou thinketh. This usage often shows up in modern parody. The forms thou and thee are often transposed (as in Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose).

Thou is also often falsely interpreted as having been formal; its use today can give an impression of stiltedness. In reading passages with thou and thee, many modern readers stress the pronouns and the verb endings. Traditionally, however, the e in -est ought to be obscure, and thou and thee should be no more stressed than you.

Some later authors use thou be'st or thou best as a subjunctive, which is contrary to Middle English usage. Traditionally, the subjunctive is be, without any verb ending:

If thou be'st born to strange sights . . . (John Donne);
If thou best a miller . . . thou art doubly a thief. (Sir Walter Scott)
In modern regional English dialects that use thou or some variant, it often takes the third person form of the verb -s. This comes from a merging of Early Modern English 2nd person singular ending -st and third person singular ending -th into -s.

History

Before the Norman Conquest, thou was governed by a fairly simple rule. It did not differ in usage from ye/you; thou addressed a single person, ye more than one.

From French, English acquired the habit of addressing kings and other aristocrats in the plural. Eventually, this was generalized, as in French, to address any social superior or stranger with a plural pronoun, which was felt to be more polite. In French, it came to pass that tu was intimate, condescending, and to a stranger potentially insulting, while the plural form vous was reserved and formal. In languages that use pronouns this way, it is called the T-V distinction.

Something of this did appear in English. At the trial of Sir Walter Raleigh in 1603, Sir Edward Coke, prosecuting for the Crown, reportedly sought to insult Raleigh by saying,

I thou thee, thou traitor!
here using thou as a verb meaning "to call thou". However, the practice never took root in standard English the way it did in French (cf. the French verb tutoyer or German duzen). However, there are examples of this practice in dialectal speech in the north of England. A formerly common refrain in Yorkshire to young, overly familiar, children was,
Don't thee tha them as thas thee!
As William Tyndale translated the Bible into English in the early 1500s, he sought to preserve the singular and plural distinctions that he found in his Hebrew and Greek originals. Therefore, he consistently used thou for the singular and ye for the plural regardless of the relative status of the speaker and the addressee. By doing so, he probably saved thou from utter obscurity, and gave it an air of solemnity that sharply distinguished it from its French counterpart. Tyndale's usage was imitated in the King James Bible, and remained familiar because of that translation.

William Shakespeare occasionally seems to use thou in the intimate, French style sense, but he is by no means consistent in using the word that way, and friends and lovers call each other ye or you as often as they call each other thou. In Henry IV, Shakespeare has Falstaff mix up the two forms speaking to Prince Henry, the heir apparent and Falstaff's commanding officer, in the same lines of dialogue. It might be said here that the Prince combined the roles of prince and drinking companion:

PRINCE: Thou art so fat-witted with drinking of old sack, and unbuttoning thee after supper, and sleeping upon benches after noon, that thou hast forgotten to demand that truly which thou wouldest truly know. What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day? …
FALSTAFF: Indeed, you come near me now, Hal … And, I prithee, sweet wag, when thou art a king, as God save thy Grace – Majesty, I should say; for grace thou wilt have none –
The use of thou in the Bible and in classical literature like Shakespeare has given the modern reader the impression that it conveys an air of formality and solemnity. This contrasts with the 18th century view when Samuel Johnson, in his A Grammar of the English Tongue, wrote: "...in the language of ceremony... the second person plural is used for the second person singular..."

Except where everyday use survives in some regions of England, the air of informal familiarity once suggested by the use of thou has disappeared; it is used in solemn ritual occasions, in readings from the King James Bible, in Shakespeare, and in formal literary compositions that seek to evoke solemn emotions. Since becoming obsolete in most dialects of spoken English, it has nevertheless been used by more recent writers to address exalted beings such as God [link], a skylark [link], Achilles [link], and even The Mighty Thor [link]. In Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vader, speaking to the Emperor, says, "What is thy bidding, master?" These recent uses of the pronoun suggest something far removed from intimate familiarity or condescension. The Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which first appeared in 1946, retained the pronoun thou exclusively to address God, using you in other places; the New Revised Standard Version (1989) omits thou entirely.

Quakers formerly used thee as an ordinary pronoun; the stereotype has them saying thee for both nominative and accusative cases. This was started by George Fox at the beginning of the Quaker movement as an attempt to preserve the egalitarian familiarity associated with the pronoun; it was not heard that way, and seemed instead to be an affected attempt at speaking like the King James Bible. Most Quakers have abandoned this usage. The dropping of the subjective case thou has also extended to their usage of the ye, the subjective 2nd person plural pronoun, which is a hypothesis of why "you" is missing its subjective case.

More recently, the philosopher Martin Buber has been translated into English as using the words I and Thou to describe our ideal familiar relationship with the Deity. Most languages which maintain both a formal and familiar second person pronoun address God with the familiar pronoun, since its usage derives from older times when the distinction between the pronouns was in number only, not in degree of familiarity. Because in current English usage, thou is perceived as more reserved and formal than you, the translation does not convey the intended meaning well.

In Modern English in some parts of northern England, tha is still used as a familiar pronoun in everyday speech. In particular throughout rural Yorkshire, the old distinction between Nominative and Objective is preserved. Genitive is often written as thy in local dialect writings, but is pronounced as an unstressed tha, and the Possessive form of tha has in modern usage almost exclusively followed other English dialects in becoming yours or the local word your’n (from your one):

 Nominative Objective Genitive Possessive
2nd Person

singular tha thee thy (tha) yours / your'n

The apparent incongruity between the archaic nominative, objective and genitive forms of this pronoun on the one hand and the modern possessive form on the other may be a signal that the linguistic drift of Yorkshire dialect is causing tha to fall into disuse; however, a measure of local pride in the dialect may be counteracting this.

Thoo has also been used in the Orcadian Dialect in place of the singular informal thou.

The modern plural problem

After the 2nd person singular forms "thou, thee, thy/thine" passed out of use in other parts of the English-speaking world, "you", previously a 2nd person plural pronoun, became the accepted standard for both the singular and plural forms. However, it eventually became evident that there was still a need for distinction between the two forms. This failing has caused different regions of the world to create their own form of 2nd person plural by morphological analogy.

North America

In the southern states of the US, y'all is a widely accepted form of 2nd person plural. In the Midwest, you'uns or yinz is sometimes used, especially around Pittsburgh. In the north, yous or youse (i.e. youse guys) is sometimes used, especially around New York. You guys is widespread throughout English-speaking North America as a means of indicating the plural (this term is used to address both men and women). However, these grammatical expressions are considered colloquialisms and are not used in formal speech or writing. The table below shows standardised 2nd person pronouns of today, with informal regional usage shown in brackets.
Nominative Objective Possessive
2nd Person

singular You You Your / Yours

''plural You [Y'all, Yous, Yinz] You [Y'all, Yous, Yinz] Your / Yours [Y'all's, Youses, Yinz's]

British Isles

In dialect of English spoken in Northern Ireland, yous or yousuns is frequently heard for the informal nominative plural and accusative plural, whilst either your or yousuns' is the possessive adjective. However, it is rare and would sound odd to hear the same form repeated with a different meaning within the same sentence.

e.g. Have yousuns heard the racket your dog is making?! (Very informal speech)

e.g. Have yous heard the racket yousuns' dog is making?! (Very informal speech)

e.g. Have youse heard the racket your dog is making?! (Ordinary speech, most dialects)

e.g. Have you heard the racket your dog is making?! (Formal speech, Ordinary speech in some dialects)

The case is similar in Scotland, with youse (and most often written with that spelling) being widely recognized as the plural.

In much of rural Ireland ye is used as the nominative and accusative plural with yeer as the possessive.

In Dublin, youse is used in the nominative and accusative plural.

See also

References

Bibliography

External links

 

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