Path: news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!not-for-mail From: ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) Newsgroups: sci.lang Subject: Re: How and why did English lose "thou" Date: 20 May 2025 20:22:05 GMT Organization: Stefan Ram Lines: 46 Expires: 1 Jun 2026 11:59:58 GMT Message-ID: References: <795757794.769464005.411061.grimblecrumble870-gmail.com@news.newsdemon.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: news.uni-berlin.de sak+yKYCG7USkz12QwZmYgwxNIUsRBXuJXmAQFXePNFhe4 Cancel-Lock: sha1:o5+FKm8a8CPO9Z2RdRI9At2xtzA= sha256:sw/c1/DVSTBP0ckrqC2ruLNAxJdSiwGkDywb9aKuzYY= X-Copyright: (C) Copyright 2025 Stefan Ram. All rights reserved. Distribution through any means other than regular usenet channels is forbidden. It is forbidden to publish this article in the Web, to change URIs of this article into links, and to transfer the body without this notice, but quotations of parts in other Usenet posts are allowed. X-No-Archive: Yes Archive: no X-No-Archive-Readme: "X-No-Archive" is set, because this prevents some services to mirror the article in the web. But the article may be kept on a Usenet archive server with only NNTP access. X-No-Html: yes Content-Language: en-US Grimble Crumble wrote or quoted: >In EmE, there were 2 distinct pronouns that translate to "you" in Modern >English: thou, used in the singular; and ye, used in the plural/formal Alright, here's the rundown. Back in the day, English had two different words for "you": "thou" for one person you knew pretty well, and "ye" for a group or for someone you wanted to show some respect. Other languages do this too, like Spanish or French. So, why did "thou" just drop off the map? Basically, around the 15th to 17th centuries, people started getting more hung up on being polite and showing respect. Folks started using "you" for everyone, even just one person, because it sounded less in-your-face. "Thou" started to feel kind of rude or old-school, unless you were talking to family or to God. There was also this thing where people wanted to sound more like the upper crust, who were already using "you" instead of "thou." So, everyone else just followed along, and "thou" got left behind, mostly in rural spots or with groups like the Quakers. English has a habit of making things easier, grammar-wise, so just having "you" for everything caught on. Even though the King James Bible still used "thou" for God, regular people were already moving on. By the 1700s, "thou" was pretty much toast in standard English, except in some dialects and in church or poetry. But people still wanted a way to talk to more than one person at once, so you get stuff like "y'all" in the South, "you guys" all over the place, "youse" in New York and Australia, and "yinz" in Pittsburgh. These are just ways to fill in the gap that "thou" left behind. Other languages kept the whole formal/informal thing because it got baked into their grammar and culture. English just went the other way and stuck with one word for both. So, "thou" faded out because people wanted to be polite and sound like the upper class, and because English likes to keep things simple. But since folks still want to tell the difference between talking to one person or a bunch, new words keep popping up to do the job.