A soc.history.what-if post of mine from almost two decades (!) ago:
"Most European languages distinguish between an impersonal form of 'you' (*Sie* in German, *vous* in French) and a more personal form (*Du* in German, *tu* in French). Subordinates address superiors in the impersonal form, superiors address subordinates in the familiar form (which is also used for children). This apparently has survived all sorts of 'democratic' revolutions; Seymour Martin Lipset (in _The First New Nation_, Anchor Books edition, p. 368) quotes an article on Soviet literature as noting that 'in Soviet fiction...the manager, in addressing subordinates, uses the time-consecrated feudal *ty* (thou), while the subordinates use the respectful *vy* (you).'
"Something like this also used to be the case in English: 'you' was primarily the plural word, but was also used in the singular as a mark of respect (normally the singular word was 'thou.') Eventually this courtesy was extended to everyone, even children. But suppose for some reason, it hadn't been. What if English still had two words for 'you'?
"It is often said--or at least used to be said--that class lines are less stratified in the U.S. than in Britain or even Canada. (Think of the stereotypical Brooklyn cab driver addressing his well-to-do passenger as 'mac' or 'buddy.') Would British employers continue to 'thou' their employees, while American workers wouldn't stand for it? No doubt in the American South, just as whites addressed blacks by their first names, whereas blacks had to address a white man as 'Mister', the familiar form would be used by whites in addressing blacks, and a demand for the abolition of it (except in addressing children) would be one of the demands of the civil rights movement.
"Of course the Quakers always thought it was wrong to address one person by the 'flattering' 'you', so they stuck with 'thou.'"
https://groups.google.com/…/soc.hi…/c0RfPIMt-u8/ylkcXZFxb-QJ
***
What made me remember that post was a recent reading of the late Hilary Putnam's *Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life* where he points out that the archaic character of "thou" in English does have consequences when we read works that have been translated from other languages. Specifically, of the Martin Buber work usually translated as *I and Thou* Putnam writes: "Walter Kaufman rightly pointed out that the German *'Du'* in the title *Ich und Du* is simply the pronoun one uses in talking to friends and family, and that translating it by the now archaic 'thou' already falsifies Buber's thought by making it somehow fake-solemn (although he kept the 'Thou' in the title of his translation, doubtless because the work was so well known by that title, while eliminating all the *thous* from the body of the work). Indeed, the use of *thou* has pretty much disappeared in recent translations of the Bible, for the same reason. (When the traditional Jew addresses God as *atah,* 'you,' and we translate this as 'thou,' we lose sight of the fact that we are supposed to address God just as we address a friend or a parent or a child, and not to use a special form of address reserved only for God.) Kaufman's decision to translate *Du* as 'you' in the body of the text already removes the first stumbling block in the path of the reader of Buber's book." https://books.google.com/books?id=WJVpaiGvoCQC&pg=PA61
"Most European languages distinguish between an impersonal form of 'you' (*Sie* in German, *vous* in French) and a more personal form (*Du* in German, *tu* in French). Subordinates address superiors in the impersonal form, superiors address subordinates in the familiar form (which is also used for children). This apparently has survived all sorts of 'democratic' revolutions; Seymour Martin Lipset (in _The First New Nation_, Anchor Books edition, p. 368) quotes an article on Soviet literature as noting that 'in Soviet fiction...the manager, in addressing subordinates, uses the time-consecrated feudal *ty* (thou), while the subordinates use the respectful *vy* (you).'
"Something like this also used to be the case in English: 'you' was primarily the plural word, but was also used in the singular as a mark of respect (normally the singular word was 'thou.') Eventually this courtesy was extended to everyone, even children. But suppose for some reason, it hadn't been. What if English still had two words for 'you'?
"It is often said--or at least used to be said--that class lines are less stratified in the U.S. than in Britain or even Canada. (Think of the stereotypical Brooklyn cab driver addressing his well-to-do passenger as 'mac' or 'buddy.') Would British employers continue to 'thou' their employees, while American workers wouldn't stand for it? No doubt in the American South, just as whites addressed blacks by their first names, whereas blacks had to address a white man as 'Mister', the familiar form would be used by whites in addressing blacks, and a demand for the abolition of it (except in addressing children) would be one of the demands of the civil rights movement.
"Of course the Quakers always thought it was wrong to address one person by the 'flattering' 'you', so they stuck with 'thou.'"
https://groups.google.com/…/soc.hi…/c0RfPIMt-u8/ylkcXZFxb-QJ
***
What made me remember that post was a recent reading of the late Hilary Putnam's *Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life* where he points out that the archaic character of "thou" in English does have consequences when we read works that have been translated from other languages. Specifically, of the Martin Buber work usually translated as *I and Thou* Putnam writes: "Walter Kaufman rightly pointed out that the German *'Du'* in the title *Ich und Du* is simply the pronoun one uses in talking to friends and family, and that translating it by the now archaic 'thou' already falsifies Buber's thought by making it somehow fake-solemn (although he kept the 'Thou' in the title of his translation, doubtless because the work was so well known by that title, while eliminating all the *thous* from the body of the work). Indeed, the use of *thou* has pretty much disappeared in recent translations of the Bible, for the same reason. (When the traditional Jew addresses God as *atah,* 'you,' and we translate this as 'thou,' we lose sight of the fact that we are supposed to address God just as we address a friend or a parent or a child, and not to use a special form of address reserved only for God.) Kaufman's decision to translate *Du* as 'you' in the body of the text already removes the first stumbling block in the path of the reader of Buber's book." https://books.google.com/books?id=WJVpaiGvoCQC&pg=PA61
)
