• @[email protected]
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    fedilink
    185 hours ago

    Someone correct me, but “you” was originally plural. The correct way to address a singular person is “thou”.

    • @logicbomb
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      74 hours ago

      I had heard that “you” was originally “thou”, and the plural was “thee”. But people used a character called “thorn” to write the “th” in “thou”, and it ended up looking like this: þou. But eventually the þ got substituted with “y”, due to some printing press shenanigans. So, “you” was singular and “ye” was plural.

      The wikipedia on “you” didn’t completely answer the question, either.

      • Skua
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        117 minutes ago

        Other commenters have already covered the you/thou thing, so to cover the printing press bit: that did happen, but with a different word. “Ye” as in “Ye Olde Village Inn” is the one. The “ye” here is “the”, and it was pronounced as “the” too. It would have been spelled “þe” before, and in blackletter style (𝔱𝔥𝔦𝔰 𝔰𝔱𝔶𝔩𝔢 𝔬𝔣 𝔩𝔢𝔱𝔱𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔫𝔤), “y” and “þ” looked awfully similar. If your press came from a country that didn’t use the thorn - and many presses in Europe did - and therefore didn’t have that character available, then you’d just use the y since they were close enough anyway

        A similar thing happened with the letter yogh (ȝ) in Scotland. It wasn’t in most presses, but it looks close enough to a z, so just use a z, and now the name “Menzies” is spelled that way despite being pronounced “ming-iss”

        That this “ye” is spelled the same way as the second person plural subject pronoun “ye” is a total coincidence

      • @[email protected]
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        fedilink
        64 hours ago

        Yesn’t. Actually no.

        The singular was thou for subject and thee for object and the plural was ye/you. In formal speech the plural was used and the subject pronoun was replaced by the object but I can’t tell you in which order.

        The þ-thing didn’t effect the pronoun but some surnames and the article. I think some pubs have names like “ye old”. They used to be “þe(=the) old” and have nothing to do with þe old pronoun, even tho it is written the same.

        • @NABDad
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          English
          24 hours ago

          God rest ye merry gentleman is the “ye” example I like to think of.

          • @[email protected]
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            fedilink
            12 hours ago

            Man Christmas dinner is gonna rock this year. Just like my mom will play dumb and look confused that I used “they” as a singular, I’m going to play dumb and look confused when she says “you”. I see no downsides.

    • @[email protected]
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      13 hours ago

      Yeah. And Y'all also used to be plural. Now it can be singular and we use All Y'all to clarify when we need people to know we mean plural. Language is bonkers.