<story><title>Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?</title><url>http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9780/did-english-ever-have-a-formal-version-of-you</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fsck--off</author><text>Second person used to be:&lt;p&gt;Singular----|----Plural&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   Thou      Ye, You

   Thee      You

   Thine     Yours

   Thy       Your
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Which correspond to the nominative, objective, and possessive cases accordingly.&lt;p&gt;By the way, the &amp;quot;Ye&amp;quot; is not related to the &amp;quot;Ye&amp;quot; in store signs that say &amp;quot;Ye Olde...&amp;quot;. Y was sometimes used by typographers instead of the Old English letter Þ(Thorn),  which makes a &amp;quot;Th&amp;quot; sound, so those store signs should be pronounced as &amp;quot;&lt;i&gt;The&lt;/i&gt; Old...&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The usage of &amp;quot;You&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;Thou&amp;quot; began in the 14th century. It was originally used in token of respect when addressing a superior, and eventually began to be used when addressing equals.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Removed part about &amp;quot;you all&amp;quot;, because some things I said were wrong and others I will have to look up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>davedx</author><text>Interesting. So the way we learned the Lord&amp;#x27;s Prayer, it seems to use the informal: &amp;quot;Thy will be done&amp;quot;. But that doesn&amp;#x27;t correlate with addressing God as &amp;quot;LORD&amp;quot;, does it?&lt;p&gt;Edit: I looked this up and found this page: &lt;a href=&quot;http://brandplucked.webs.com/theeandye.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;brandplucked.webs.com&amp;#x2F;theeandye.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;It seems to infer that &amp;quot;thou, thee&amp;quot; etc. are only about distinguishing between singular and plural. There&amp;#x27;s no mention of them being an informal form, at least not in the King James Bible.&lt;p&gt;Even more:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;As William Tyndale translated the Bible into English in the early 16th century, 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 original meaning. Tyndale&amp;#x27;s usage was imitated in the King James Bible, and remained familiar because of that translation.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Then more from Wikipedia - the plot thickens!&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Early English translations of the Bible used thou and never you as the singular second-person pronoun, with the double effect of maintaining thou in usage and also imbuing it with an air of religious solemnity that is antithetical to its former sense of familiarity or disrespect.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Also, apparently French uses the informal (see &amp;quot;toi&amp;quot; in the Lord&amp;#x27;s Prayer), whereas Dutch uses formal (U&amp;#x2F;uw).</text></comment>
<story><title>Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?</title><url>http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9780/did-english-ever-have-a-formal-version-of-you</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fsck--off</author><text>Second person used to be:&lt;p&gt;Singular----|----Plural&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   Thou      Ye, You

   Thee      You

   Thine     Yours

   Thy       Your
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Which correspond to the nominative, objective, and possessive cases accordingly.&lt;p&gt;By the way, the &amp;quot;Ye&amp;quot; is not related to the &amp;quot;Ye&amp;quot; in store signs that say &amp;quot;Ye Olde...&amp;quot;. Y was sometimes used by typographers instead of the Old English letter Þ(Thorn),  which makes a &amp;quot;Th&amp;quot; sound, so those store signs should be pronounced as &amp;quot;&lt;i&gt;The&lt;/i&gt; Old...&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The usage of &amp;quot;You&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;Thou&amp;quot; began in the 14th century. It was originally used in token of respect when addressing a superior, and eventually began to be used when addressing equals.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Removed part about &amp;quot;you all&amp;quot;, because some things I said were wrong and others I will have to look up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tikwidd</author><text>A couple of other English pronoun tidbits:&lt;p&gt;- The third person plural set (they, their, them) was borrowed from Scandinavian (it&amp;#x27;s pretty uncommon for languages to borrow &amp;#x27;core&amp;#x27; vocabulary such as pronouns).&lt;p&gt;- Old English (Anglo-Saxon) also had dual forms of the pronoun. Those were lost by Chaucer&amp;#x27;s time though. Not sure if they are reflexes of early PIE dual forms or a more recent development from Proto-Germanic.&lt;p&gt;[Sara Malton] [1] has some interesting ideas about how the you&amp;#x2F;thee distinction developed in the semantic dimensions of power as well as familiarity in Early Modern English.&lt;p&gt;There are many new 2p. plural forms developing in English that vary regionally and socially, e.g y&amp;#x27;all, you guys, yous, you&amp;#x27;uns (-&amp;gt; yinz), all y&amp;#x27;all.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/courses/6361Malton.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;homes.chass.utoronto.ca&amp;#x2F;~cpercy&amp;#x2F;courses&amp;#x2F;6361Malton.ht...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>