Lasting Informal "You" in English

As mentioned already, forms of "thou" still exist dialectally (mostly in Northern/Lancashire and some West Country/Somerset English). Secondly, I don't see why you couldn't have *thou and singular *you coexist, their Spanish, French and German equivalents sure do. The first is for informal usage (relatives, friends, colleagues), the latter for formal usage (bosses, strangers), and some variant of "y'all"/"youse"/"you'uns"/etc. could still refer to second-person plural.

Perhaps have a different "register" of English be the unifying standard other than London Chaucery, again such as York or Bristol English?
 
German might getting away from a formal "Sie". I visit "Skat-Spielen, a German card site almost daily. the announcement and all the players use "Du". Nobody uses "Sie'.
 
It looks like most Germanic languages are switching to one pronoun more than the other, either *thou or *you, even if they still retain the other word officially. For example, the "jij/u" split in Dutch exists but IIRC both are derivatives of the formal "V" form (like if English had a formal "you"/informal "ya" split...wait, we kinda do!). I know Danish is undergoing a similar disappearance of the formal form just like German is, which given its geography makes sense.

What's weird is that the T-V underwent a switch in English, where the "thou" form became fairly "uppity" due to its use in religious contexts. That switch actually has happened in dialects of Central/South American Spanish with the return of the "vos" form. Just food for thought about the consequences of a surviving "thou" in English.
 
German might getting away from a formal "Sie". I visit "Skat-Spielen, a German card site almost daily. the announcement and all the players use "Du". Nobody uses "Sie'.
It's really common in school though. In my experience students always used "Sie" on the teacher and only some teachers said "Du".

What I find interesting about the German "Sie" is that it's not even derived from the second person, but from the third person plural.
 
It's really common in school though. In my experience students always used "Sie" on the teacher and only some teachers said "Du".

What I find interesting about the German "Sie" is that it's not even derived from the second person, but from the third person plural.

Sounds sort of like Spanish, which uses "usted" as the formal second person but conjugates the same way as third-person singular and plural respectively.
 
People in North East England and some Scots use "yous" for more plural. Tends to cause either confusion or hilarity in the rest of England, even though it's perfectly sensible.
 
It's interesting that "thou" is now considered formal, while while it was in common use it was the exact opposite.
 
I'm curious, is there a particular reason English dropped the distinct second person singular pronoun ?

As a result of French influence, the 2nd person plural pronoun became seen as a more polite form of the 2nd person singular pronoun. Unlike French, this trend ended up so strong that the original 2nd person singular pronoun was eventually all but wiped out.

So yeah. Blame William the conqueror.
 
Sounds sort of like Spanish, which uses "usted" as the formal second person but conjugates the same way as third-person singular and plural respectively.

Italian has both third person singular feminine or second person plural (with verbs inflected accordingly, while adjectives may be confusing- see below) for formality contexts. The former is way more common today and it may be influenced by Spanish use, why the later, now seen as aulic and old-fashioned to the point of funny, is probably from French.

The formal/informal distinction is slowly losing ground in actual usage, (especially, I guess, because the use of either feminine forms with masculine reference or feminine pronouns with masculine adjectives sounds awkward when addressing a male person) but still holds.
The informal second person singular pronoun marks either familiarity or parity (or both) more than informal context per se.

It seems that the vast majority of continental European languages do mark formal "second person" forms with either French-derived pluralization or with third person forms (derived probably by analogs of "Your Grace" and such). English is notable in having dropped the distinction entirely in moern use, generalizing the formal use and losing the singular/plural pronoun distinctio in the process.
 
quite right!

Don't some forms of Scots (Glaswegian?) use "y'ins"?
I live in the north west of England and do quite a lot of business in Glasgow, so all the "yousages" are well known and practiced by me.

I regularly use thee (as in si thee - good bye) thy (as in thi's geet a luvly ound - you have a handsome dog) yous (as in does yous want another pint _ do you all want another pint) although I must admit that last one is not uttered THAT often!
A freind of mine came up from London to see me last year, we took him to the pub and he was lost for the earlier part of the night - he just couldnt get his head round the English we used, especially when reverting back to nordic words such as "laikin abart" (fooling around) though I must say that as the night progressed, Timothy Taylor did a great job in helping him translate, as did Arthur Guinness and a fine Spitfire!
 
Don't some forms of Scots (Glaswegian?) use "y'ins"?
Quite possibly. My connections North of the border are almost exclusively Edinburgh and Dundee based. The only 'Glaswegians' I know are really from Milngavie and like places, speaking everything from BBC English through to a wonderful Scots-Californian hybrid (the last one spent five or so years of her childhood state-side)
 
Don't some forms of Scots (Glaswegian?) use "y'ins"?

That's definitely used in Pittsburgh (and spelled yinz here). That said, it is a recent corruption of yunz (you'unz) and then eventually stabilized as yinz.

It is widely thought to come from the Scotch-Irish though.
 
That's definitely used in Pittsburgh (and spelled yinz here). That said, it is a recent corruption of yunz (you'unz) and then eventually stabilized as yinz.

It is widely thought to come from the Scotch-Irish though.

While it's not pronounced "yinz" but rather "you'uns" or "y'uns", that phrase seems to exist pretty much across the breadth of Appalachia, all the way to the northern bits of Alabama, which was pretty much the stomping grounds of the Scotch-Irish during the Colonial era. I've heard it exists in Arkansas and the Missourian Ozarks, but I've no firsthand experience with that.
 

Thande

Donor
Back when I raised this question in soc.history.what-if in 1997, an Englishman noted that "There's still a bit of 'thee' and 'tha' around. I've know people from Sheffield who use them as a familiar 'you'. In fact, Dearne Valley people call Sheffielders 'Deedars' for this very reason." https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/c0RfPIMt-u8/DISc86BLQ9gJ

Slight correction there: everyone in Yorkshire (broadly speaking) uses thee and tha, but Sheffield people are called Dee-Dahs because they pronounce Th as D.
 
How would that prevent the demise of thou and related pronouns? It's not like it fell out of use because we had to write two letters for a digraph rather than just one.

It's not like 'þou' is any more compelling than 'thou'.

My comment wasn't to be taken too seriously...
 
Don't some forms of Scots (Glaswegian?) use "y'ins"?

I'm no expert on that particular tribal culture :)D), but the word "yin" corresponds to "one" I believe. Although I have a Glaswegian friend who, when counting, begins with something which sounds like "een". I hear "yous" used a lot and occasionally use it myself.
 
It's really common in school though. In my experience students always used "Sie" on the teacher and only some teachers said "Du".

What I find interesting about the German "Sie" is that it's not even derived from the second person, but from the third person plural.
In the 18th and early 19th century there was a linguistic fashion in german to address other people not only in the already existing 2nd person singular and plural, but in the 3rd person singular and plural as well to better express the social status of those addressing and being addressed. If e.g. a noble would address a peasant or servant he would use the 3rd person singular, e.g. Frederic II was known to regularly ask his male subjects "Hat Er gedient?", literally "Did he serve?", meaning "Have you served (in the army)?".

The peasant or servant was expected to address a superior in the 2nd person plural (Ihr, generally with added honorifics, e.g. "Haben Euer Gnaden wohl gespeist", i.e.: "Have Your Grace enjoyed Your meal") while they would address anyone from they own class in the old, simple 2nd person singular (Du). Aristocrats among themselves would use either the 2nd person plural (Ihr) or 3rd person plural (Sie) addressing each other while the ascendant bourgeoisie preferred the 3rd person plural to a point that even children were expected to address their parents that way and were in return also addressed that way in combination with their first names, something still common in senior high schools where teachers will address students that way, e.g.: "Nicole, würden Sie bitte zur Tafel kommen?" ("Nicole, would you please come to the blackboard?") as well as parents, especially in middle and upper class families, addressing visiting friends of their adolescent children, e.g.: "Patrick, darf ich Ihnen noch ein Stück Kuchen anbieten?" ("Patrick, may I offer you another piece of cake?").

With the ascendance of the bourgeoisie in the 19th century the 3rd person plural formal address became the standard while the 2nd person plural fell out of use just like the 3rd person singular. Thus you have a 2nd person singular informal and a 3rd person formal address since nearly 2 centuries in german.
 
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just to add to the current conversation, I just heard 2 young bogans say "youz" (yous' ?) which based on context was meant as 2nd pp. considering the /z/ ending is usualy indicative of plural in english, that one would make sense to me though it could be more easily confused with the 2nd ps then "y'all".
 
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