Lasting Informal "You" in English

The general explanation I've heard was a combination of two things: the reformation of the writing system and society post-Norman Conquest and the printing press issues.

For the former, the idea was that William removed a large part of the English-speaking bureaucracy and replaced them with primarily French speaking or Latin literate people, who used different systems to write vowels and consonants. This is why, for example, th was adopted in some parts to replace the thorn and eth, because French had no equivalent and the recorders randomly decided to pick two letters that together meant nothing in French to symbolize the sound. Thou suffered similarly in the transition. The other reasoning given was that post-Norman led to a strengthening of the feudal roles and enforcing much stricter dependence on proper respect for superiors. Eventually, that led to people speaking with "thou" only to people they were very intimate with to show respect, and because the kids grew up never being able to speak using the thou form the vast majority of people they talked to(parents, lords, churchmen, other elders, etc.) it eventually faded out of the system.

And the other problem was that the printing press did not have the thorn or eth either so areas that had retained it needed to adopt alternatives, which often included the style created by Norman monks and bureaucrats, which gets "thou" replaced with "you" because the vowel sound is the same but there was little way to replicate the thorn.

Back to the original question, the best chance for the survival of thou on a widespread basis is averting the Norman Conquest or altering it to a large extent that prevents the rapid changeover to different writing styles and forms of address.

Don't some forms of Scots (Glaswegian?) use "y'ins"?
Some Scots use it and, in a random quirk, so does Pittsburgh.

American dialects in general have adopted unofficial variants to create a plural second person. There's obviously y'all, but the Midwest uses "You guys" regardless of gender and in technically ungrammatical ways such as "This is you guys's class right?", for example. I don't know how far the survival of Youse/Youse guys extends, though it does supposedly exist to some extent in certain areas.
 
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I don't feel the lack of a formal/informal distinction in the language, but having a second person plural is a crying need. All the current work-arounds are stupid. Hey, you guys!
 
Back to the original question, the best chance for the survival of thou on a widespread basis is averting the Norman Conquest or altering it to a large extent that prevents the rapid changeover to different writing styles and forms of address.

Given that the thou/you distinction managed to survive for some six hundred years after the Battle of Hastings, I don't think that doing away with the Conquest is really necessary.

As for the erasure of the distinction, the explanation I heard is that a fashion arose among the English nobility for being super-polite by only using "you", and that this ended up catching on with the country as a whole. Doing away with this should be enough, IMHO.
 
Given that the thou/you distinction managed to survive for some six hundred years after the Battle of Hastings, I don't think that doing away with the Conquest is really necessary.

As for the erasure of the distinction, the explanation I heard is that a fashion arose among the English nobility for being super-polite by only using "you", and that this ended up catching on with the country as a whole. Doing away with this should be enough, IMHO.

maybe a more equalitarian british society so that the formal form is reserved for elders, judges, someone you're sucking up to, etc... and the thou is the everyday form of address.
 
American dialects in general have adopted unofficial variants to create a plural second person. There's obviously y'all, but the Midwest uses "You guys" regardless of gender and in technically ungrammatical ways such as "This is you guys's class right?", for example. I don't know how far the survival of Youse/Youse guys extends, though it does supposedly exist to some extent in certain areas.

Singaporean English inconsistently tends to use "you all" as a second person plural. I personally use "y'all" because it's snappier :D
 
At least this isn't a problem where i live, even if i would never write "y'all" on a school paper.

It's funny that even though we eliminated these words, variants will always return, just in an unstandardized manner.
 
Singaporean English inconsistently tends to use "you all" as a second person plural. I personally use "y'all" because it's snappier :D

I use "y'all" too but then again I suppose that's for want of any alternative other than "you all" or "you lot" (thanks, Chesapeake watermen!).

I also like how Afrikaans seems to have their version in "julle" too. Granted it's etymologically different from our word, but it seems to have evolved strikingly similar to it nonetheless :D.
 
I use "y'all" too but then again I suppose that's for want of any alternative other than "you all" or "you lot" (thanks, Chesapeake watermen!).

I also like how Afrikaans seems to have their version in "julle" too. Granted it's etymologically different from our word, but it seems to have evolved strikingly similar to it nonetheless :D.

I think Dutch also uses jullie
 
funny that in French, the pronoun being gradually abandoned is the 1st pp "nous" being replaced by the 3rd ps singular pronoun "on". For those not familiar with French, "on" is normaly use in an impersonal fashion like in a quote "on dit souvent que....." ("it is often said that...."). It is not the same as the English "it" however as it is never used to designate objects.

People are still aware this is "wrong" though as I often hear people from quebec who do not want a particular speaker to be included in a group action jokingly repeating verbatim the rule that "on exclut la personne qui parle" ("on exclude the person who is talking").

Because verbs in French conjugate based on the person and number, this also mean that if this trend continues, endings in -ons will also disappear:

We eat
Nous mangeons
On mange
 

JJohnson

Banned
Ye is just a form of you isn't it?

Rather, 'you' is a form of 'ye.'

There are historically 4 cases in English: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and a remnant of the instrumental.

In Old English: ge, eower, eow, eowic (N, G, D, A)
In Middle English: ye, your, you (serving as both dative and accusative).

The nominative is the subject and root form. The genitive is what some call 'possessive' form. The dative is the indirect object, and the accusative is the direct object of a given verb.

In Early Modern English: ye, your, you
Now: you, your, you.

Ye is the 2nd person plural, We is the 1st person plural.
Thou is the 2nd person singular: thou, thy, thee

Middle English: þou, þy, þee
Old English: þu, þín, þé, þec
(Compare: du, dein, dir, dich from Modern German)
 
"Ye Olde NO SHUT UP IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE ÞE, ÞE!"

I don't know, did people have trouble with P versus Þ before? I may be wrong, but I don't believe so.

not sure about Þ but it happened with a few different short hand method of writing that lead to confusion later on. For example, the plural ending "x" in some French words actually come the way "u" and "s" were often written entwined using a single stroke. When later transcribed, they were written with an "x" and the "missing" "u" was reinserted.
 
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)?".

<omitted>

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.

Thanks a lot, that's a great explanation.
 
In current Swedish we only make the singular-plural distinction, but except English and Irish, almost every other current European language seems to use the familiar versus formal distinction. (I have not looked at all of them, so it is just my impression.) It feels wrong for me to use the formal form to someone.
 
The general explanation I've heard was a combination of two things: the reformation of the writing system and society post-Norman Conquest and the printing press issues.

For the former, the idea was that William removed a large part of the English-speaking bureaucracy and replaced them with primarily French speaking or Latin literate people, who used different systems to write vowels and consonants. This is why, for example, th was adopted in some parts to replace the thorn and eth, because French had no equivalent and the recorders randomly decided to pick two letters that together meant nothing in French to symbolize the sound. Thou suffered similarly in the transition.

I'm skeptical of explanations like these. Historically, writing has followed the patterns of speech, not vice versa. Moreover, back then only a small proportion of the population was literate - and not necessarily literate in English.

At any rate, thou and thee were still going strong in the age of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, and then seem to have dramatically declined in use during the 17th and 18th centuries. It seems more plausible to me that, for whatever reason, they just fell out of fashion during that time among aristocratic circles, and this usage change gradually filtered down.
 
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