Thou

Grammar

Because thou has passed out of common use, its traditional forms are often confused by those imitating old speech.

Declension

The English personal pronouns have standardised declension according to the following table:

Conjugation

Verb forms used after thou generally end in -(e)st in the indicative mood in both the present and the past tenses. These forms are used for both strong and weak verbs.

Typical examples of the standard present and past tense forms follow. The e in the ending is optional; early English spelling had not yet been standardized. In verse, the choice about whether to use the e often depended upon considerations of meter.

to know: thou knowest, thou knewest

to drive: thou drivest, thou drovest

to make: thou makest, thou madest

to love: thou lovest, thou lovedest

A few verbs have irregular thou forms:

to be: thou art (or thou beest), thou wast (or thou wert; originally thou were)

to have: thou hast, thou hadst

to do: thou dost /dʌst/ (or thou doest in non-auxiliary use) and thou didst

shall: thou shalt

will: thou wilt

In Proto-English, the second-person singular verb inflection was -es. This came down unchanged from Indo-European and can be seen in quite distantly related Indo-European languages: Russian знаешь, znayesh, thou knowest; Latin amas, thou lovest. (This is parallel to the history of the third-person form, in Old English -eþ, Russian, знает, znayet, he knoweth, Latin amat he loveth.) The anomalous development from -es to modern English -est, which took place separately at around the same time in the closely related German and Frisian languages, is understood to be caused by an assimilation of the consonant of the pronoun, which often followed the verb. This is most readily observed in German: liebes du → liebstu → liebst du (lovest thou). The three languages belong to the West Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages, of which Frisian is the closest to English.

Comparison

In Dutch, the equivalent of "thou", du, also became archaic and fell out of use and was replaced by the Dutch equivalent of "you", gij (later jij or u), just as it has in English, with the place of the informal plural taken by jullie (cf. English you people, you guys).

In the subjunctive and imperative moods, the ending in -(e)st is dropped (although it is generally retained in thou wert, the second-person singular past subjunctive of the verb "to be"). The subjunctive forms are used when a statement is doubtful or contrary to fact; as such, they frequently occur after "if" and the poetic "and".

If thou be Johan, I tell it thee, right with a good advice ...; Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart ... I do wish thou wert a dog, that I might love thee something ... And thou bring Alexander and his paramour before the Emperor, I'll be Actaeon ... O WERT thou in the cauld blast, ... I'd shelter thee ...

In modern regional English dialects that use thou or some variant, such as in Yorkshire, it often takes the third person form of the verb -s. This comes from a merging of Early Modern English second person singular ending -st and third person singular ending -s into -s (the latter a southern variation of -þ (-th)).

The present indicative form art ("þu eart") goes back to West Saxon Old English (see OED s.v. be IV.18) and eventually became standard, even in the south (e.g. in Shakespeare and the Bible). For its influence also from the North, cf. Icelandic þú ert. For its ultimate origin, see OED be, etymology section i.ε/ζ. The preterite indicative of be is generally thou wast.

Etymology

Thou originates from Old English þū, and ultimately via Grimm's law from the Proto-Indo-European *tu, with the expected Germanic vowel lengthening in accented monosyllabic words with an open syllable. Thou is therefore cognate with Icelandic and Old Norse þú, German and Continental Scandinavian du, Latin and all major Romance languages, Irish, Kurdish, Lithuanian and Latvian tu or tú, Greek σύ (sy), Slavic ты / ty or ти / ti, Armenian դու (dow/du), Hindi तू (tū), Bengali: তুই (tui), Persian تُو‎ (to) and Sanskrit त्वम् (tvam). A cognate form of this pronoun exists in almost every other Indo-European language. The second person pronouns in Uralic languages such as Finnish and Hungarian are also similar.

History

In Old English, thou was governed by a simple rule: thou addressed one person, and ye more than one. After the Norman Conquest, which marks the beginning of the French vocabulary influence that characterized the Middle English period, thou was gradually replaced by the plural ye as the form of address for a superior person and later for an equal. For a long time, however, thou remained the most common form for addressing an inferior person.

The practice of matching singular and plural forms with informal and formal connotations is called the T–V distinction and in English is largely due to the influence of French. This began with the practice of addressing kings and other aristocrats in the plural. Eventually, this was generalized, as in French, to address any social superior or stranger with a plural pronoun, which was felt to be more polite. In French, tu was eventually considered either intimate or condescending (and to a stranger, potentially insulting), while the plural form vous was reserved and formal.

In the 18th century, Samuel Johnson, in A Grammar of the English Tongue, wrote: "in the language of ceremony ... the second person plural is used for the second person singular", implying that the second person singular was still in everyday use. By contrast, The Merriam Webster Dictionary of English Usage says that for most speakers of southern British English, thou had fallen out of everyday use, even in familiar speech, by sometime around 1650. Thou persisted in a number of religious, literary and regional contexts, and those pockets of continued use of the pronoun tended to undermine the obsolescence of the T–V distinction. (Samuel Johnson himself was born and raised not in the south of England, but in Lichfield, Staffordshire, where the usage of thou persists until the present day, see below, so it is not surprising that he would consider it entirely ordinary and describe it as such, as he indeed does in his grammar. This would seem to resolve the apparent contradiction above.)

One notable consequence of the decline in use of the second person singular pronouns thou, thy, and thee is the obfuscation of certain sociocultural elements of Early Modern English texts, such as many character interactions in Shakespeare's plays. In Richard III, for instance, the conversation between the Duke of Clarence and the two murderers takes on a very different tone if it is read in light of the social connotations of the pronouns used by the characters.

Use as a verb

Many Indo-European languages contain verbs meaning "to address with the informal pronoun", such as German duzen, the Norwegian noun dus refers to the practice of using this familiar form of address instead of the De/Dem/Deres formal forms in common use, French tutoyer, Spanish tutear, Swedish dua, Dutch jijen en jouen, Russian тыкать (tykat'), Polish tykać, Romanian tutui, Hungarian tegezni etc. Although uncommon in English, the usage did appear, such as at the trial of Sir Walter Raleigh in 1603, when Sir Edward Coke, prosecuting for the Crown, reportedly sought to insult Raleigh by saying,

I thou thee, thou traitor!

here using thou as a verb meaning "to call thee". Although the practice never took root in Standard English, it occurs in dialectal speech in the north of England. A formerly common refrain in Yorkshire for admonishing children who misused the familiar form was:

Don't thee tha them as thas thee! ("Don't thee thou them as thous thee")

And similar in Lancashire dialect:

Don't thee me, thee; I's you to thee! ("Don't thee me, thee [i.e., "you child"]; I'm you to thee!")

See further the Wiktionary page on thou as a verb.

Religious uses

As William Tyndale translated the Bible into English in the early 16th century, he preserved the singular and plural distinctions that he found in his Hebrew and Greek originals. He used thou for the singular and ye for the plural regardless of the relative status of the speaker and the addressee. Tyndale's usage was standard for the period and mirrored that found in the earlier Wycliffe's Bible and the later King James Bible. But as the use of thou in non-dialect English began to decline in the 18th century, its meaning nonetheless remained familiar from the widespread use of the latter translation.

The 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which is still the authorized form of worship in the Church of England, also uses the word thou to refer to the singular second person.

Quakers formerly used thee as an ordinary pronoun; the stereotype has them saying thee for both nominative and accusative cases. This was started at the beginning of the Quaker movement by George Fox, who called it "plain speaking", as an attempt to preserve the egalitarian familiarity associated with the pronoun. Most Quakers have abandoned this usage. At its beginning, the Quaker movement was particularly strong in the northwestern areas of England and particularly in the north Midlands area. The preservation of thee in Quaker speech may relate to this history. Modern Quakers who choose to use this manner of "plain speaking" often use the "thee" form without any corresponding change in verb form, for example, is thee or was thee.

In Latter-day Saint prayer tradition, the terms "thee" and "thou" are always and exclusively used to address God, as a mark of respect.

In many of the Quranic translations, particularly those compiled by the Ahmadiyya sect in Islam, the terms thou and thee are used. One particular example is The Holy Quran - Arabic Text and English translation, translated by Maulvi Sher Ali.

In the English translations of the scripture of the Bahá'í Faith, the terms thou and thee are also used. Shoghi Effendi, the head of the religion in the first half of the 20th century, adopted a style that was somewhat removed from everyday discourse when translating the texts from their original Arabic or Persian to capture some of the poetic and metaphorical nature of the text in the original languages and to convey the idea that the text was to be considered holy.

The Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which first appeared in 1946, retained the pronoun thou exclusively to address God, using you in other places. This was done to preserve the tone, at once intimate and reverent, that would be familiar to those who knew the King James Version and read the Psalms and similar text in devotional use. The New American Standard Bible (1971) made the same decision, but the revision of 1995 (New American Standard Bible, Updated edition) reversed it. Similarly, the 1989 Revised English Bible dropped all forms of thou that had appeared in the earlier New English Bible (1970). The New Revised Standard Version (1989) omits thou entirely and claims that it is incongruous and contrary to the original intent of the use of thou in Bible translation to adopt a distinctive pronoun to address the Deity. When referring to God, "thou" is often capitalized for clarity and reverence. While Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic (the languages of the Bible) do not have a special orthography (such as capitalization) for indicating that the Deity is being referred to, their grammars are more successful than English in making noun/pronoun agreement unambiguous.

Shakespeare

Like his contemporaries William Shakespeare uses thou both in the intimate, French style sense, and also to emphasize differences of rank, but he is by no means consistent in using the word, and friends and lovers sometimes call each other ye or you as often as they call each other thou, sometimes in ways that can be analysed for meaning, but often apparently at random.

For example, in the following passage from Henry IV, Shakespeare has Falstaff use both forms with Henry. Initially using "you" in confusion on waking he then switches to a comfortable and intimate "thou".

PRINCE: Thou art so fat-witted with drinking of old sack, and unbuttoning thee after supper, and sleeping upon benches after noon, that thou hast forgotten to demand that truly which thou wouldest truly know. What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day? ... FALSTAFF: Indeed, you come near me now, Hal ... And, I prithee, sweet wag, when thou art a king, as God save thy Grace – Majesty, I should say; for grace thou wilt have none –

While in Hamlet, Shakespeare uses discordant second person pronouns to express Hamlet's antagonism towards his mother.

QUEEN GERTRUDE: Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.. HAMLET: Mother, you have my father much offended.

More recent uses

Except where everyday use survives in some regions of England, the air of informal familiarity once suggested by the use of thou has disappeared; it is used in solemn ritual occasions, in readings from the King James Bible, in Shakespeare and in formal literary compositions that intentionally seek to echo these older styles. Since becoming obsolete in most dialects of spoken English, it has nevertheless been used by more recent writers to address exalted beings such as God, a skylark, Achilles, and even The Mighty Thor. In The Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vader addresses the Emperor with the words: "What is thy bidding, my master?" In Leonard Cohen's song "Bird on the Wire", he promises his beloved that he'll reform, saying "I will make it all up to thee." The Kaiser Chiefs song "I Predict a Riot" is mentioned below. In Diana Ross's song "Upside Down" (written by Chic's Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards) we hear the lyric "Respectfully I say to thee I'm aware that you're cheatin'." These recent uses of the pronoun suggest something far removed from intimate familiarity or condescension, while they could be seen as mirroring the mode of address used with the Deity in the Bible as discussed above; or in the case of "Upside Down", may simply allow a catchy rhyme.

Most modern writers have no experience using thou in daily speech; they are therefore vulnerable to confusion of the traditional verb forms. The most common mistake in artificially archaic modern writing is the use of the old third person singular ending -eth with thou, for example thou thinketh. The converse – the use of the second person singular ending -est for the third person—also occurs ("So sayest Thor!" – spoken by Thor). This usage often shows up in modern parody and pastiche in an attempt to make speech appear either archaic or formal. The forms thou and thee are often transposed.

In the fictional teenage argot nadsat, invented for Anthony Burgess's novel A Clockwork Orange (and the film adaptation), Alex and his droogs regularly use "thou", which fits in with their semi-Edwardian clothing. For example, when fighting a rival gang, Alex addresses them thus (note the mixing of "you" and "thou" for the second person):

Well if it isn't fat stinking billygoat Billyboy in poison! How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly thou!

Some translators render the T–V distinction in English with "thou" and "you", particularly in places where you appears in the place of expected thou, or vice versa. This practice has largely fallen out of use. Ernest Hemingway, in his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, uses the forms "thou" and "you" in order to reflect the relationships between his Spanish-speaking characters and to better represent in English the Spanish language in which both formal (usted) and familiar (tú) second-person pronouns still exist.

In reading passages with thou and thee, many modern readers stress the pronouns and the verb endings. Traditionally, however, the e in -est ought to be unstressed, and thou and thee should be no more stressed than you.

Current usage

You is now the standard English second-person pronoun and encompasses both the singular and plural senses. In some dialects, however, "thou" has persisted, and in others thou is retained for poetic and/or literary use. Further, in others the vacuum created by the loss of a distinction has led to the creation of new forms of the second-person plural, such as y'all in the Southern United States. The forms vary across the English-speaking world and between literature and the spoken language.

Persistence of second-person singular

In traditional dialects, thou is used in the counties of Cumberland, Westmorland, Durham, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire and some western parts of Nottinghamshire. Such dialects normally also preserve distinct verb forms for the singular second person, for example thee coost (standard English: you could, archaic: thou couldst) in northern Staffordshire. The word thee is used in the East Shropshire dialect which is now largely confined to the Dawley area of Telford and referred to as the Dawley dialect. Throughout rural Yorkshire, the old distinction between nominative and objective is preserved. The possessive is often written as thy in local dialect writings, but is pronounced as an unstressed tha, and the possessive form of tha has in modern usage almost exclusively followed other English dialects in becoming yours or the local word your'n (from your one):

The apparent incongruity between the archaic nominative, objective and genitive forms of this pronoun on the one hand and the modern possessive form on the other may be a signal that the linguistic drift of Yorkshire dialect is causing tha to fall into disuse; however, a measure of local pride in the dialect may be counteracting this.

Some other variants are specific to certain areas. In Sheffield, the pronunciation of the word was somewhere in between a /d/ and a /th/ sound, with the tongue at the bottom of the mouth; this led to the nickname of the "dee-dahs" for people from Sheffield. In Lancashire and West Yorkshire, ta was used as an unstressed shortening of thou, which can be found in the song "On Ilkla Moor Baht 'at". These variants are no longer in use.

In rural North Lancashire between Lancaster and the North Yorkshire border 'tha' is preserved in colloquial phrases such as "What would tha like for tha tea?" (What would you like for dinner), and " 'appen tha waint" ("perhaps you won't" – happen being the dialect word for perhaps) and "tha knows" (you know). This usage in Lancashire is becoming rare, except for elderly and rural speakers.

The use of the word "thee" in the hit song "I Predict a Riot" by Leeds band Kaiser Chiefs ("Watching the people get lairy / is not very pretty, I tell thee") caused some comment by people who were unaware that the word is still in use in the Yorkshire dialect.

The use of the phrase "tha knows" has been widely used in various songs by Arctic Monkeys, a popular band from High Green, a suburb of Sheffield. Alex Turner, the band's lead singer, has also often replaced words with "tha knows" during live versions of the songs. His election to sing in his native Sheffield accent and their overall revival of the dialect has been met with positive feedback and critical acclaim.

The use persists somewhat in the West Country dialects, albeit somewhat affected. Some of the Wurzels songs include "Drink Up Thy Zider" and "Sniff Up Thy Snuff".

Thoo has also been used in the Orcadian Scots dialect in place of the singular informal thou. In Shetlandic, the other form of Insular Scots, du and de are used. The word "thou" has been reported in the North Northern Scots dialect of Cromarty as being in common use in the first half of the 20th century and now only in occasional use.

Use in cinema

The word thou can occasionally be heard in films recorded in certain English dialect. In Ken Loach's films Kes and The Price of Coal, the word is used frequently in the dialogue. It is used occasionally, but much less frequently, in the 1963 film This Sporting Life.