a little history
1 Jun 2005 01:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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flamesword, who I know will squee with delight when she finds this essay upon her return. In the meantime, have some history of you/thou constructs, and a detail I didn't know about how 'thou' fell out, to be replaced by 'you' entirely.
To condense several centuries of linguistic, political, and religious turmoil into two paragraphs: The converse of the royal we was the royal you; a monarch referring to himself in the plural was addressed in the plural. Over the years, in most of the countries and languages of Europe, the nobility arrogated to themselves the right to this form of address, and it finally spread throughout the upper classes, until it came to represent, not the absolute rank of the addressee, but the relative ranks of addressee and speaker: inferiors addressed superiors with you, and were in turn addressed with thou. Parents thoued their children, bosses thoued their workers, nobles thoued commoners; and the children, workers, and commoners replied with you. Equals, on the other hand, addressed each other by the same term: you in the upper classes; thou in the lower.
Singular you is first cited around 1350. By 1550, the thou/you contrast was in full bloom. And in 1648, something happened that would eventually expunge thou from the language and leave English the only major European language without a singular or a familiar second-person pronoun: George Fox founded the Society of Friends. The Quaker insistence on addressing all folk by the familiar singular was a revolutionary act, an outright refusal to observe the forms of worldly power structures. As a backlash, you was embraced so completely that it became the default, and within a century thou was in a sharp decline, soon to vanish entirely from most English dialects (though, as with so many other features of early English, it held on much longer in the North.)
flamesword, who I know will squee with delight when she finds this essay upon her return. In the meantime, have some history of you/thou constructs, and a detail I didn't know about how 'thou' fell out, to be replaced by 'you' entirely.To condense several centuries of linguistic, political, and religious turmoil into two paragraphs: The converse of the royal we was the royal you; a monarch referring to himself in the plural was addressed in the plural. Over the years, in most of the countries and languages of Europe, the nobility arrogated to themselves the right to this form of address, and it finally spread throughout the upper classes, until it came to represent, not the absolute rank of the addressee, but the relative ranks of addressee and speaker: inferiors addressed superiors with you, and were in turn addressed with thou. Parents thoued their children, bosses thoued their workers, nobles thoued commoners; and the children, workers, and commoners replied with you. Equals, on the other hand, addressed each other by the same term: you in the upper classes; thou in the lower.
Singular you is first cited around 1350. By 1550, the thou/you contrast was in full bloom. And in 1648, something happened that would eventually expunge thou from the language and leave English the only major European language without a singular or a familiar second-person pronoun: George Fox founded the Society of Friends. The Quaker insistence on addressing all folk by the familiar singular was a revolutionary act, an outright refusal to observe the forms of worldly power structures. As a backlash, you was embraced so completely that it became the default, and within a century thou was in a sharp decline, soon to vanish entirely from most English dialects (though, as with so many other features of early English, it held on much longer in the North.)