Thou
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- For other uses, see Thou (disambiguation).
Image:Shakespeare.jpg The word thou (pronounced IPA [ðaʊ]) is mostly archaic, functioning as the second person singular pronoun in English and having been replaced in almost all contexts by you. Thou is the nominative form; the oblique/objective form is thee (functioning as both accusative and dative), and the possesive is thy or thine. Almost all verbs following "thou" have the endings -st or -est; e.g., "thou goest". In Middle English, thou was sometimes abbreviated by writing a Wynn-shaped letter Thorn with a small u above it.
Originally, "thou" was simply the singular counterpart to the plural pronoun "ye," descended from an ancient Indo-European root. In imitation of the French practice, "thou" was later used to express intimacy, familiarity, or even disrespect while another pronoun, "you" was used for formal circumstances as a matter of T-V distinction. After "thou" fell out of fashion, it was primarily retained in fixed rituals, so that it eventually came to connote formality and solemnity. "Thou" persists, sometimes in altered form, in regional dialects of England and Scotland.<ref>Shorrocks, 433-438.</ref> However, in standard modern English, thou continues to be used only in religious contexts, in literature that seeks to capture an archaic sense of formality, and in certain fixed phrases such as "holier than thou" and "fare thee well." "You" has replaced both "thou" and "ye" in standard English, but the distinction between singular and plural is sometimes colloquially expressed in North America by singular "you" and such plural pronouns as "you-all", "y'all", "you guys", and along with some dialects of English, "youse", "youse guys", "you'uns", or even "yinz".
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[edit] Grammar
Before the Norman Conquest, thou was governed by a fairly simple rule. It did not differ in usage from ye or you; thou addressed one person, and ye more than one. Due to influence from other European languages, the plural you was thought for a time to be more respectful and formal than singular thou; the perceived abruptness of thou curtailed its use. For most modern English users, thou now carries an almost exactly opposite connotation of solemn formality: thou is still sometimes used in ritual, to address the deity, in older literature, and in recent texts that imitate older styles.
[edit] Declension
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 |
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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, and 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 possessive of it as well as of he. Later, the neologism its became common. Both can be found in the 1611 King James Bible.
[edit] 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:
Typical examples of the standard present and past tense forms follow. The es enclosed in parentheses are optional; this was typical of early English spelling which had not yet been standardized.
- to know: thou knowest, thou knew(e)st
- to drive: thou drivest, thou drovest
- to make: thou makest, thou madest
- to love: thou lovest, thou loved(e)st
A few verbs have irregular thou forms:
- to be: thou art, thou wast (or thou wert; originally thou were)
- to have: thou hast, thou hadst
- to do: thou dost (or thou doest, in non-auxiliary use) and thou didst
- shall: thou shalt
- will: thou wilt
The second- and third-person singular verb endings derive from the Indo-European "s" and "t" (cf. Russian знаешь, znayesh, you know; знает, znayet, he knows). The resemblance between the verb forms of English and those of the closely related German and Frisian languages is apparent, as the following table demonstrates. The three languages belong to the West Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages, of which Frisian is the closest to English.
| 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? |
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 . . .;<ref>Middle English carol:
If thou be Johan, I tell it the
Ryght with a good aduyce
Thou may be glad Johan to be
It is a name of pryce.
</ref> - Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart . . .<ref>Eleanor Hull, Be Thou My Vision, 1912 translation of traditional Irish hymn, Rob tu mo bhoile, a Comdi cride.</ref>
- I do wish thou wert a dog, that I might love thee something . . .<ref>Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, act IV, scene 3.</ref>
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.
[edit] Historical usage
[edit] 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 Icelandic and Old Norse þú, Latin, French, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Irish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Portuguese, and Romanian tu or tú, modern German, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish du, Greek σύ, Russian ты (ty), Slovenian ti, Armenian դու, Hindi, Persian تُو (to), and Sanskrit tvam. A cognate form of this pronoun exists in almost every other Indo-European language.<ref>Entries for thou and *tu, in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language</ref>
[edit] T-V distinction
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 either intimate or condescending (and, to a stranger, potentially insulting), while the plural form vous was reserved and formal. Languages that distinguish pronouns in this way are said to use the T-V distinction.
Some languages developed verbs meaning "to address with the informal pronoun," such as the French tutoyer, the German duzen, and the Spanish tutear. Although uncommon in English, the usage did appear. 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! <ref>Reported, among many other places, in H. L. Mencken, The American Language (1921), ch. 9, ss. 4., "The pronoun".[1]</ref>
here using thou as a verb meaning "to call thou". Although the practice never took root in standard English, it occurs in dialectal speech in the north of England. A formerly common refrain in Yorkshire, which admonished overly familiar children, declared:
- Don't thee tha them as thas thee!
In the 18th century, Samuel Johnson, in A Grammar of the English Tongue, wrote: "...in the language of ceremony... the second person plural is used for the second person singular...", implying that the second person singular was still in everyday use. By contrast, The Merriam Webster Dictionary of English Usage says that for most speakers of southern British English, thou had fallen out of everyday use, even in familiar speech, by sometime around 1650. <ref>Entry for thou in The Merriam Webster Dictionary of English Usage.</ref> Thou persisted in a number of religious, literary, and regional contexts, and those pockets of continued use of the pronoun tended to undermine the T-V distinction.
[edit] Religious uses
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.<ref>David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography. (Yale, 1995) ISBN 0-300-06880-8. See also David Daniell, The Bible in English: Its History and Influence. (Yale, 2003) ISBN 0-300-09930-4.</ref>
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. This was done to preserve a reverent tone that would be familiar to those who read the Psalms and similar text in devotional use.<ref>Preface to the Revised Standard Version 1971</ref> The New American Standard Bible (1971) made the same decision, but the revision of 1995 (New American Standard Bible, Updated edition) reversed it. The New Revised Standard Version (1989) omits thou entirely, and notes that it is incongruous and contrary to the original intent of the use of thou in Bible translation to adopt a distinctive pronoun to address the Deity.<ref>NRSV: To the Reader</ref> When referring to God, "thou" is often capitalized.
Quakers formerly used thee as an ordinary pronoun; the stereotype has them saying thee for both nominative and accusative cases.<ref>See, for example, The Quaker Widow by Bayard Taylor</ref> 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, who called it "plain speaking"; 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. At its beginning, the Quaker movement was particularly strong in the northwestern areas of England, and particularly in the north Midlands area. The preservation of thee in Quaker speech may relate to this history.<ref>David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford, 1991). ISBN 0-19-506905-6</ref>
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.
[edit] Literary uses
[edit] Shakespeare
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 –
[edit] More recent uses
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 intentionally seek to echo these older styles. 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 <ref>Psalm 90 from the Revised Standard Version</ref>, a skylark <ref>Ode to a Skylark by Percy Bysshe Shelley</ref>, Achilles <ref>The Iliad, translated by E. H. Blakeney, 1921</ref>, and even The Mighty Thor <ref>The Mighty Thor 528</ref>. 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.
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. The converse also occurs, using the second person singular ending -est for the third person ("So sayest Thor!" — spoken by Thor). This usage often shows up in modern parody and pastiche.<ref>See, for example, Rob Liefeld, "Awaken the Thunder" (Marvel Comics, Avengers, vol. 2, issue 1, cover date Nov. 1996, part of the Heroes Reborn storyline.)</ref> The forms thou and thee are often transposed (as in Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose). However, in his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls , Ernest Hemmingway preserved the forms "thou" and "you" in order to reflect the relationships between his Spanish-speaking characters.
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.
[edit] Current usage
After the second-person singular forms "thou, thee, thy/thine" passed out of use in other parts of the English-speaking world, "you", previously a second-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 second-person plural by morphological analogy.
[edit] British Isles
[edit] Persistence of second-person singular
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. The possessive 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 Scots dialect in place of the singular informal thou.
[edit] Neologisms for second-person plural
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 provincial 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.
[edit] 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, youse, or you guys is sometimes used, especially around New York. These usages may be the American variants of British coinages noted above. 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 guys] | You [Y'all, Yous, Yinz, You guys] | Your / Yours [Y'all's, Youses, Yinz's, You guys's] |
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
<references/>
[edit] References
- Burrow, J. A., Turville-Petre, Thorlac. A Book of Middle English. ISBN 0-631-19353-7
- Daniel, David. The Bible in English: Its History and Influence. ISBN 0-300-09930-4.
- Shorrocks, Graham. "Case Assignment in Simple and Coordinate Constructions in Present-Day English." American Speech, Vol. 67, No. 4 (Winter, 1992).
- Smith, Jeremy. A Historical Study of English: Form, Function, and Change. ISBN 0-415-13272-X
- Trudgill, Peter. (1999) Blackwell Publishing. Dialects of England. ISBN 0-631-21815-7
[edit] Bibliography
- Personal Pronouns in Present-Day English by Katie Wales (Author) ISBN 0-521-47102-8
[edit] External links
- A Grammar of the English Tongue by Samuel Johnson - includes description of 18th century use of thou
- Contemporary use of thou in Yorkshire
- Thou: The Maven's Word of the Day
- You/Thou in Shakespeare's Work (archived forum discussion)
- A Note on Shakespeare's Grammar by Seamus Cooney
