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60-509: The word thou ( / ð aʊ / ) is a second-person singular pronoun in English . It is now largely archaic , having been replaced in most contexts by the word you , although it remains in use in parts of Northern England and in Scots ( /ðu:/ ). Thou is the nominative form; the oblique / objective form is thee (functioning as both accusative and dative ); the possessive

120-515: 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 will reform, saying "I will make it all up to thee." In Diana Ross's song, " Upside Down ", (written by Chic 's Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards ) there

180-479: A lesser extent. In many languages, the verb takes a form dependent on the person of the subject and whether it is singular or plural. In English , this happens with the verb to be as follows: Other verbs in English take the suffix -s to mark the present tense third person singular, excluding singular 'they'. In many languages, such as French , the verb in any given tense takes a different suffix for any of

240-474: A more topical third person, and obviative for a less topical third person. The obviative is sometimes called the fourth person. In this manner, Hindi and Bangla may also categorize pronouns in the fourth, and with the latter a fifth person. The term fourth person is also sometimes used for the category of indefinite or generic referents, which work like one in English phrases such as "one should be prepared" or people in people say that... , when

300-627: A northern 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 . The preterite indicative of be is generally thou wast . Thou originates from Old English þū , and ultimately via Grimm's law from

360-479: A statement is doubtful or contrary to fact; as such, they frequently occur after if and the poetic and . In modern regional English dialects that use thou or some variant, such as in Yorkshire and Lancashire , 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

420-430: A stranger, potentially insulting), while the plural form vous was reserved and formal. Fairly suddenly in the 17th century, thou began to decline in the standard language (that is, particularly in and around London), often regarded as impolite or ambiguous in terms of politeness. It persisted, sometimes in an altered form, particularly in regional dialects of England and Scotland farther from London, as well as in

480-418: Is thy (adjective) or thine (as an adjective before a vowel or as a possessive pronoun); and the reflexive is thyself . When thou is the grammatical subject of a finite verb in the indicative mood , the verb form typically ends in -(e)st (e.g. "thou goest", "thou do(e)st"), but in some cases just -t (e.g., "thou art"; "thou shalt"). Originally, thou was simply the singular counterpart to

540-603: Is a second-person plural pronoun used mainly in Western Pennsylvania English . It is most prominent in Pittsburgh , but it is also found throughout the cultural region known as Appalachia , located within the geographical region of the Appalachians . Yinz is the most recent derivation from the original Scots-Irish form you ones or yous ones , a form of the second-person plural that

600-585: Is a software program with a Pittsburgh theme. YinzCam is a Pittsburgh -based software development company. At the end of every episode of VH-1's Top 20 Countdown , host Jim Shearer always says "I'm Jim Shearer, and I'll see yinz later." In the TV series One Dollar (2018) set in a rust belt town (shot in and around Pittsburgh), the Yinz address is frequently used. Waypoint YINZZ in Newell, West Virginia marks

660-510: 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

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720-535: Is commonly heard in parts of Ulster . In the first- and third-person, standard English speakers use distinct pronouns to denote singular and plural. In the first person, for example, speakers use the singular I and the plural we . However, the second-person pronoun you performs a double duty since it is both the singular form and the plural form. Crozier (1984) suggests that during the 19th century, when many Irish-speakers switched to speaking English, they filled that gap with you ones , primarily because Irish has both

780-604: Is far from consistent in his writings, his characters primarily tend to use thou (rather than you ) when addressing another who is a social subordinate, a close friend or family member, or a hated wrongdoer. Many European languages contain verbs meaning "to address with the informal pronoun", such as German duzen , French tutoyer , Spanish tutear and vosear , Swedish dua , Dutch jijen en jouen , Ukrainian тикати ( tykaty ), Russian тыкать ( tykat' ), Polish tykać , Romanian tutui , Hungarian tegezni , Finnish sinutella , etc. Additionally,

840-591: 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 or yous by some Australians and heard in what are generally considered working class dialects in and near cities in

900-474: Is often capitalized, e.g. "For Thou hast delivered my soul from death" ( Psalm 56:12–13 ). 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

960-472: 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 West Frisian languages, is understood to be caused by an assimilation of the consonant of the pronoun, which often followed

1020-499: Is the T–V distinction . Some other languages have much more elaborate systems of formality that go well beyond the T–V distinction, and use many different pronouns and verb forms that express the speaker's relationship with the people they are addressing. Many Malayo-Polynesian languages , such as Javanese and Balinese , are well known for their complex systems of honorifics ; Japanese , Korean , and Chinese also have similar systems to

1080-669: Is the lyric "Respectfully I say to thee I'm aware that you're cheatin'." In " Will You Be There ", Michael Jackson sings, "Hold me / Like the River Jordan / And I will then say to thee / You are my friend." Notably, both Ross's and Jackson's lyrics combine thee with the usual form you . 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. You

1140-521: 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 , 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

1200-703: The youse , which is found mainly in New York City and Chicago, the Philadelphia dialect and New Jersey; and y'all , which is ubiquitous in the South. A similar form with similar Irish and Scots roots is found in the Atlantic Provinces of Canada. Rarely written, it is spelled yous and is usually pronounced as [jɪ̈z] or something between [jɪ̈z] and [jʊ̈z] . It is sometimes combined with all for emphasis, as in, "are yous all coming to

1260-684: The North Yorkshire border tha is preserved in colloquial phrases such as "What would tha like for thi tea?" (What would you like for your 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. A well-known routine by comedian Peter Kay , from Bolton, Greater Manchester (historically in Lancashire), features

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1320-752: 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. In Old English , thou

1380-520: 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,

1440-587: The English Tongue , wrote: "in the language of ceremony ... the second person plural is used for the second person singular", implying that thou was still in everyday familiar use for the second-person singular, while you could be used for the same grammatical person, but only for formal contexts. However, Samuel Johnson himself was born and raised not in the south of England, but in the West Midlands (specifically, Lichfield , Staffordshire), where

1500-487: The English translations of the scripture of the Baháʼí 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

1560-605: 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. 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, here using thou as a verb meaning to call (someone) "thou" or "thee" . Although

1620-484: The choice about whether to use the e often depended upon considerations of meter . Modal verbs also have -(e)st added to their forms: A few verbs have irregular thou forms: A few others are not inflected: 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

1680-652: 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. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer , which is still an authorized form of worship in the Church of England and much of the Anglican Communion , also uses

1740-485: 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". While in Hamlet , Shakespeare uses discordant second person pronouns to express Hamlet's antagonism towards his mother. Except where everyday use survives in some regions of England, the air of informal familiarity once suggested by

1800-405: The following table: Verb forms used after thou generally end in -est (pronounced /ᵻst/ ) or -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,

1860-540: The grammar treats them differently from ordinary third-person forms. The so-called "zero person" in Finnish and related languages, in addition to passive voice , may serve to leave the subject-referent open. Zero person subjects are sometimes translated as "one", although in tone it is similar to English's generic you " Ei saa koskettaa " ("Not allowed to touch", "You should not touch"). Yinz Yinz (see § History and usage below for other spellings)

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1920-453: The idea that the text was to be considered holy. 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

1980-440: The initial consonant was pronounced as /d/, which led to the nickname of the "dee-dahs" for people from Sheffield. In Lancashire and West Yorkshire, ta [tə] was used as an unstressed shortening of thou , which can be found in the song " On Ilkla Moor Baht 'at ", although K.M. Petyt found this form to have been largely displaced from urban West Yorkshire in his 1970-1 fieldwork. In rural North Lancashire between Lancaster and

2040-496: The language of such religious groups as the Society of Friends . Reasons commonly maintained by modern linguists as to the decline of thou in the 17th century include the increasing identification of you with "polite society" and the uncertainty of using thou for inferiors versus you for superiors (with you being the safer default) amidst the rise of a new middle class. In the 18th century, Samuel Johnson , in A Grammar of

2100-669: The language of such religious groups as the Society of Friends . The use of the pronoun is also still present in Christian prayer and in poetry. Early English translations of the Bible used the familiar singular form of the second person, which mirrors common usage trends in other languages. The familiar and singular form is used when speaking to God in French (in Protestantism both in past and present, in Catholicism since

2160-457: 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, although a measure of local pride in the dialect may be counteracting this. Some other variants are specific to certain areas: In Sheffield ,

2220-714: The northeastern United States. The forms vary across the English-speaking world and between literature and the spoken language. It also survives as a fossil word in the commonly-used phrase "holier-than-thou". In traditional dialects, thou is used in the English counties of Cumberland , Westmorland , Durham , Lancashire , Yorkshire , Staffordshire , Derbyshire , and some western parts of Nottinghamshire . The Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects , which began in 1968, found that thou persisted in scattered sites across Clwyd , Dyfed , Powys , and West Glamorgan . Such dialects normally also preserve distinct verb forms for

2280-544: The party?" That usage is also common within Carbon and Schuylkill Counties, Pennsylvania. Being one of Pennsylvania's most famous regionalisms makes yinz a badge of pride. For example, a group of Pittsburgh area radical cheerleaders call themselves "Yinz Cheer", and an area literary magazine was called The New Yinzer , a take-off of The New Yorker . Those perceived to be stereotypical blue collar Pittsburgh residents are often referred to as Yinzers . Yinztagram

2340-464: The phrase "Has tha nowt moist?” (Have you got nothing moist?). The use of the word "thee" in the 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 word "thee" is also used in the song Upside Down "Respectfully, I say to thee / I'm aware that you're cheating". The use of

2400-552: 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. Grammatical person In Indo-European languages , first-, second-, and third-person pronouns are typically also marked for singular and plural forms, and sometimes dual form as well ( grammatical number ). Some other languages use different classifying systems, especially in

2460-521: The plural pronoun ye , derived from an ancient Indo-European root. In Middle English , thou was sometimes represented with a scribal abbreviation that put a small "u" over the letter thorn : þͧ (later, in printing presses that lacked this letter, this abbreviation was sometimes rendered as yͧ). Starting in the 1300s, thou and thee were used to express familiarity, formality, or contempt, for addressing strangers, superiors, or inferiors, or in situations when indicating singularity to avoid confusion

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2520-422: The plural pronouns. One frequently found difference not present in most Indo-European languages is a contrast between inclusive and exclusive "we" : a distinction of first-person plural pronouns between including or excluding the addressee. Many languages express person with different morphemes in order to distinguish degrees of formality and informality. A simple honorific system common among European languages

2580-960: The post– Vatican II reforms), German , Spanish , Italian , Portuguese , Scottish Gaelic and many others (all of which maintain the use of an "informal" singular form of the second person in modern speech). In addition, the translators of the King James Version of the Bible attempted to maintain the distinction found in Biblical Hebrew , Aramaic and Koine Greek between singular and plural second-person pronouns and verb forms, so they used thou , thee , thy , and thine for singular, and ye , you , your , and yours for plural. In standard Modern English , thou continues to be used in formal religious contexts, in wedding ceremonies ("I thee wed"), in literature that seeks to reproduce archaic language, and in certain fixed phrases such as " fare thee well ". For this reason, many associate

2640-629: The practice never took root in Standard English, it occurs in dialectal speech in the north of England. A formerly common refrain in Yorkshire dialect for admonishing children who misused the familiar form was: And similar in Lancashire dialect : Many conservative Christians use "Thee, Thou, Thy and Thine when addressing God" in prayer ; in the Plymouth Brethren catechism Gathering Unto His Name , Norman Crawford explains

2700-422: The practice: The English language does contain reverential and respectful forms of the second person pronoun which allow us to show reverence in speaking to God. It has been a very long tradition that these reverential forms are used in prayer. In a day of irreverence, how good to display in every way that we can that "He (God) is not a man as I am" (Job 9:32). When referring to God, "thou" (as with other pronouns)

2760-463: The pronoun is variably referred to or spelled as you'uns , y'ins , y'uns , yunz , yuns , yinz , yenz , yins, or ynz . In other parts of the United States, Irish or Scots-Irish speakers encountered the same gap in the second-person plural. For that reason, these speakers are also responsible for coining the yunz , which is used in and around Middletown, Pennsylvania;

2820-458: The pronoun tended to undermine the obsolescence of the T–V distinction. 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, which were mostly written from 1589 to 1613. Although Shakespeare

2880-633: The pronoun with solemnity or formality. Many dialects have compensated for the lack of a singular/plural distinction caused by the disappearance of thou and ye through the creation of new plural pronouns or pronominals, such as yinz , yous and y'all or the colloquial you guys . Ye remains common in some parts of Ireland, but the examples just given vary regionally and are usually restricted to colloquial speech. Because thou has passed out of common use, its traditional forms are often confused by those imitating archaic speech. The English personal pronouns have standardized declension according to

2940-464: The singular second person: for example, thee coost (standard English: you could , archaic: thou couldst ), in northern Staffordshire. 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 pronoun has in modern usage almost exclusively followed other English dialects in becoming yours or

3000-417: The singular second-person pronoun tú and the plural form sibh . The following, therefore, is the most likely path from you ones to yinz : you ones [juː wʌnz] > you'uns [juːʌnz] > youns [juːnz] > yunz [jʌnz] > yinz [jɪ̈nz] . Because there are still speakers who use each form, there is no stable second-person plural pronoun form in the southwest or central Pennsylvania area, so

3060-428: 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. By contrast, for most speakers of southern British English , thou had already 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

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3120-469: The use of thou has disappeared; it is used often for the opposite effect with 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,

3180-443: The various combinations of person and number of the subject. The grammar of some languages divide the semantic space into more than three persons. The extra categories may be termed fourth person , fifth person , etc. Such terms are not absolute but can refer, depending on context, to any of several phenomena. Some Algonquian languages and Salishan languages divide the category of third person into two parts: proximate for

3240-491: The verb. This is most readily observed in German: liebes du → liebstu → liebst du (lovest thou). There are some speakers of modern English that use thou/thee but use thee as the subject and conjugate the word with is/was, i.e. thee is, thee was, thee has, thee speaks, thee spoke, thee can, thee could . However this is not considered standard. In Dutch , the equivalent of "thou", du , also became archaic and fell out of use and

3300-498: The word thou to refer to the singular second person. Quakers traditionally used thee as an ordinary pronoun as part of their testimony of simplicity —a practice continued by certain Conservative Friends ; 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

3360-547: 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

3420-415: Was governed by a simple rule: thou addressed one person, and ye more than one. Beginning in the 1300s 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

3480-419: Was needed; concurrently, the plural forms, ye and you , began to also be used for singular: typically for addressing rulers, superiors, equals, inferiors, parents, younger persons, and significant others. In the 17th century, thou fell into disuse in the standard language, often regarded as impolite, but persisted, sometimes in an altered form, in regional dialects of England and Scotland , as well as in

3540-474: 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 ( compare English y’all ). 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

3600-465: 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 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

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