Talk:Persian verbs

Thou Art

The canonical person table (1st, 2nd, 3rd and their plurals) oddly has "thou art" in parentheses with an asterisk preceding it. Is this because "thou art" is understood by the author as a pseudo-approximation to English in order to differentiate it from you (2nd person plural) or because, as in English, this person and it's associated forms and conjugations are moribund in the spoken language? If the former is the case, I think it is rather overly quaint and pedantic to use "thou". If the later is the case, shouldn't we still leave it as you singular for ease of comprehension. I assume the asterisk means "not in use" because it precedes the words, rather than following them, which would indicate a footnote with extra information.

For comparison, in many dialects of Brazilian Portuguese, "tu" (2nd person singular) is absent, as is its associated conjugations -the second person singular having been replaced by você, which conjugate sad though it were third singular. Just the same, those tu forms are still found in literary sources, as well as Biblical scripture. Just the same, though etymologically related, it is never presented as Thou in English grammatical comparisons. (Though maybe in translations of Bible verses..."thou shall not...")

In either case, it is very confusing to someone with no background in the language, like me, who is here for a cursory understanding of the verb system for comparative reasons. Thank you. 50.144.3.131 (talk) 18:31, 5 October 2014 (UTC)Tom in Florida