A Simple Guide to Theeing and Thouing for Beginners
I've noticed that many people make hash out of 17th-century English when they attempt to use Thee and Thou and other usages connected to those archaic forms. They mis-conjugate verbs, don't understand the possessive forms of the pronouns and just generally don't sound rightly Biblical and King Jamesish when they write.
As a pedantic person who bristles at such poor diction, I thought I'd offer a link to an easy-to-grasp guide to this arcane and antiquated manner of speech and writing. I do this as a public service, and so I don't have to watch the language of our ancestors being abused.
For thine edification, visit:
https://rsc.byu.edu/archived/volume-4-number-1-2003/teaching-usage-thee-and-thou
= new reply since forum marked as read
And parallels the use of "mister".
A hierarchical society that sanctions large class differences is okay with T/V pronouns. Spanish, for instance, has a four-fold set of pronouns: tu/usted and vosostros/ustedes. Note that "usted" is recent, "vuestra merced", in which lies the roots of the dissolution of the T/V pattern in English.
Plural was for plural entities. "Senores, escucheis!" (Sorry, don't do non-vanilla characters on this computer.) Spanish innovated "usted" for V, kept tu (or went with "vos"
for older tu.
In French "vous" and in German "Sie" became resolutely singular, but talking up to the addressee.
English did the same thing. Except that at the same time we became more egalitarian. Everybody became "equal" in some sense. It helped that "ye/you" and "thou/thee" were heading in different directions, phonologically, so we got accusative "you" and too often accusative "thee" as the new nominatives. But just as everybody became plural and it was hard to know who, exactly, was inferior, it became easier to dispose of "thou" except in archaic uses.
Just like "master" was eroded phonologically to "mister" and from there became the all-purpose term of address for males. I grew up aware that "master" was still reserved for minor males, but that gets a lot of pushback by people who not only don't know that system, but can't imagine that system not being somehow racist or offensive. (Honored are the closed-minded, for they shall inherit society, and be thou glad when th'art offended, for of such is the cohort of the blessed.)
It wasn't helped by having the conjugation also go a bit opaque. Take "workest"; that's fine, but that vowel wanted to go away. "Worked" had two syllables and became "workt" in pronounciation. I've heard "workst" pronounced, and it's awkward, but what you expect from the sound changes at the time. "Worked"/"workt" and workedst"/"worktst" become impossible. "Thou worked" is simply wrong.
The declination was gone, the honorific system in flux, and the choice of pronouns a bit confusing (you, thou; you, thee). People went with simpler, not because we like simple--that's a bit too telic for my taste--but because the phonology and sociolinguistics pushed that way. They pushed a bit differently in Spanish and German and French and Italian, because they had different phonologies and different cultural traditions.
Similarly, "we" didn't like having all the sound changes make "isn't" and "hasn't" into "ain't". There was pushback for the standard. But just as "thou" lasted longest where there wasn't a push for prestige, so "ain't" lasted longest where proper speech wasn't a desideratum.
Of course, that story is from the scholarly linguistics literature from the late '80s/early '90s. Who knows what they've redecided must have happened.
how do you the present day version of our language evolved?
...maybe, perhaps by abusing the language of our ancestors?
