Thee, Thou, Ye, You!

I realized a few weeks ago that I use the familiar ("thee" and "thou") when talking with friends. (I also talk with my hands, and I also lapse into "fake German" and "fake French" when English words fail me. But that is beside the point).

My sisters and I refer to one another as "thee" and "thou" all the time. It's now apparently carried over to my interaction with other people. When I run into Jessie or Laura or someone else I know very well, my immediate reaction is to say, "Hi! And how art thou doing?" If I have time to think about it, I can check myself and say "How are you doing?" But it sounds very forced to my ear when I do so.

I have also recently realized that English has no second person familiar plural pronoun. Or at least none that is distinctly familiar.

In somewhat simpler English: There's no clear way to address two or more people at once as "thou." In my particular case, I ended up saying something like, "Hi! How art...how art thou two? Thou and thou? Thou all? doing??"

And if you are still utterly confused (which is quite utterly likely), here is a picture to straighten some things out:



(If you examine the chart closely, you will see that there's technically no way at all to definitively refer to multiple people in the second person. We get around this problem in everyday English by saying things like "you all" or "you guys" or "you people" or "y'all." But in standard English, there's no way to distinguish a plural "you" from a non-plural "you." Or a familiar plural "you" from a formal plural "you".)

ANYHOW! Laura brought up the word "ye" as a possible solution. And I have finally gotten around to researching the precise usage of the word, and its potential to solve this dilemma.

Basically -- it allows us to have an official second person plural. It does not, however, allow a distinction between familiar 2nd person and formal 2nd person:



Moreover, "ye" can only be used as a subject or predicate nominative. It can't be used as a direct object. We have to use "you" again:



Finally, "ye" has perhaps more connotations of the formal than familiar.

And here is a short history of why all of these things are the case, and of how we ended up with the mess of pronouns we have today:



And now I'm going to bed.