HOW TO USE THOU ...as well as thee, thy, ye & you.

And then there's all of yinz in Pittsburgh, and youse guys in Philadelphia.

I, for one, lament the loss of thou and thee, thy and thine. Welsh has 'ti' and 'chi' (for thou and ye, respectively) but the formal 'chi' seems to become less formal with each new generation of speakers and 'ti' is increasing in usage. My grandparents would never have addressed their parents with 'ti'.

Can thou tell thee when these pronouns fell out of common usage?

Very useful - thank you, Rob!

I wish we still used thou/thee and ye/you for singular and plural. It gives the second person clarity.

This somehow reminds me of german grammar in conjugations. However we were not thought at university of thou/thee usage. Never thought thou would stand for informal. Tiny bit confused that more nice word would stand for informal language😅

The funcamental distinction between THOU/THEE/THY/THINE and YE/YOU/YOUR/YOURS is number (singular vs. plural). Secondarily it was used to show status/rank. I don't know why you did not include this fact straightaway.

1. "ye" comes from Germanic: *jīz (nominative).
2. "you" comes from Germanic: *izwiz (dative), the original morphological accusative *izw didn't survive in late Germanic continuum and was replaced by *izwiz. Dative also replaced original instrumental suffixes in pronouns, dative suffix *-iz started work as an instrumental.

thou speaketh der conjegashen less'ns te der engleans!
though, thee must hadth spoken about der dutchies!
For ye hast not spoketh about der enfusiasm!
ayeeeee

Coming from a German background, this is really intuitive for me, as it is pretty much parallel to the conjugations of the informal du. Thank you for presenting this so systematically!

One additional point, thy and thine as possessives follow the same rules as "a" and "an", it's thy pear, but thine apple. If it's not directly followed by a word, it defaults to thine, as in "this one is thine".

I live my life believing Thou etc was used for someone higher than you like God, King etc... Knowing its actually the informal one is a massive plot twist

I'm probably two years late and repeating a note others have made ... but the use of singular-informal in the Bible is present in all the other European languages I know, and I believe (but could always be wrong) it was a faithful (ha! pun not intended) translation of the "How to pray" scenes in the New Testament (Matthew 6, Luke 11): Jesus is trying to convey to his disciples to address God sincerely and without fanfare. (Does anyone know what the older Greek versions used?)

“Is it good unto thee that thou shouldest oppress, That thou shouldest despise the work of thine hands, And shine upon the counsel of the wicked?”

‭‭Job‬ ‭10‬:‭3‬ ‭KJV‬‬

But English would be a little more to ther European languages if the would use the formal an informal you

This would have been a good place to explain "Mine" in places like Psalm 121 ("I will lift up mine eyes until the hills").

We still disambiguate a/an based on whether the next word starts with a vowel. It used to apply to my/mine, and I assume all the other possessive pronouns.

i was trying to figure out what is ment and how it has changed over the years the term is " Hear ye" usualy said 3 time to get attention. and this "Oyez" used as slang by court reporters?
how do we pronounce and which is the formal version.

We still use 'Thee' in Sheffield still 🤣

Bring them back!

What if a person is doing something to themselves? Is it thee hast punched herself? Or thou hast punched himself?