WI English still had two words for "you"?

You guys, the proper plural of "you" is "you guys":p

So sayeth this Canadian.

My students always ask what "you guys" means. It's only after I started teaching English in Japan that I realized how much I use it to address groups.
 
When was the first known instance of 'you'? Could it have arisen simply as a mispronunciation of a thorn?

It's from the accusative and dative of ge - eow:
Nom. ge
Acc. eow
Gen. eower
Dat. eow

- and was pronounced like yo.

It moved into the nominal thanks to confusion with þu which was beginning to be pronounced like tho.

It's worth noting that some rural dialects have preserve ye as a plural.
 
Seconded, as this is probably the prime reason (there are others) "thou" dissepeared in the first place.

Interesting; Without ever having looked further into the question, I just quietly assumed that the disappearance of the thou/ye distinction in English was due to same conventionally assumed causes which lead to the disappearence of the original du/gij distinction in Dutch around roughly the same time (it had already lost the dental fricative at that point): copycatting from French and the rise of bourgeois conversation styles. That's why I always wondered why such a distinction didn't reemerge in the high prestige sociolects of English the same way as it did in Dutch (the plural jullie being basically the equivalent of you guys; I guess it is harder for English to have a separate formal u because of the lack of a as clearly distinct oblique form of you in modern English).
 

Thande

Donor
The OP is not talking about singular versus plural you, he's talking about formal you versus informal thou. Yorkshire and a few other Northern dialects are I believe the only forms of English where the T/V distinction still exists. If tha ever does owt for nowt, allus do it for thissen.
 
The OP is not talking about singular versus plural you, he's talking about formal you versus informal thou. Yorkshire and a few other Northern dialects are I believe the only forms of English where the T/V distinction still exists. If tha ever does owt for nowt, allus do it for thissen.

Yes but in the Germanic languages t/v generally evolved out of the sg/pl distinction - the plural being used as the formal.
 
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