First off, for us that speak Modern English, you is singular and then there are two many ways to say you plural, so I’ll use my dialect’s version y’all (to clearly show plurality). Of the plural ye, the author says, "It has continued to this day and in the south of Ireland it is the non-stigmatised variety of English for plural second-person reference."Ĭlick to expand.Ok, two things here. When some Irish emigrated, they brought with them these forms, which is the origin of the use in some dialects of American English of youse and yez. The lack of a plural form for you constituted a sort of gap, which was filled in by using ye, which had been inherited from medieval Irish English, as the plural form.Ī later method to fill the gap was to make a plural based upon you, which took the form of youse and later of yez. Jucker, from which I found the following via Google Books, at the time that thou disappeared in Irish English, leaving you as the singular as well as plural form, most Irish were still monolingual speakers of Irish, in which the second-person pronouns have singular and plural forms. This was very interesting, I checked it out and that's how I understood it too.Īccording to Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems by Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. This makes it difficult to answer your question. "You" is now used for both singular and plural. You might want to look at this interesting article on "thou":Īs I understand it, "thou" is the singular form, not "you". There are still some portions of England that have retained the second person singular, as I understand it. We have also lost the second person singular conjugations of our verbs (in a shortened example): thou art / you are, thou wast / you were, thou hast / you have. "Thine" is the equivalent of "yours" (or "your" if the following word began with a vowel). "Thee" is the singular direct object for "you". "Thy" is "your" as the singular possessive pronoun. This is how I understand it used to be, but you may find a better example on the internet: Thanks!Īs I understand it, "thou" is the singular form, not "you". Also if anyone knows is "thee/thy" and "thou/thine" the same, or is one formal and the other informal? Sorry if it's a little confusing but after studying other languages, I would like to know that English has an equivalent option to express oneself without sounding uneducated using "you guys". I was just wondering if there has ever existed a form of the plural you in English? Even in Old English? Just as thee= you thy=your is there any pronoun in Old English for "you" plural or any alternative for how they say in some parts of the USA "you guys"? For bilingual (Spanish) forum goers it would be equivalent to ustedes, for Portuguese it would be voces, and for German it would be Sie (I believe).but in English?
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