Talk:Thou

Thou is a former featured article. Please see the links under Article milestones below for its original nomination page (for older articles, check the nomination archive) and why it was removed.

This article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on September 12, 2007.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
December 18, 2003	Featured article candidate	Promoted
September 5, 2006	Featured article review	Kept
April 13, 2010	Featured article review	Demoted

Current status: Former featured article

Archives

June 2003 to October 2008

A-M

Hungarian is not an indo-european language, it is a fenno-uralic language and relative to Finnish, Estonian and others. It may be that it has a "you" form similar to thou, I don't know but it is not a relative language to new or old english. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.170.82.20 (talk) 21:22, 9 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

kipling

I seem to recall that in 'Kim (novel)' Kipling renders conversations in the indian vernacular(s) using the second-person singluar, and those in English using the plural. This creates an interesting effect and might be worth including in this article under 'More recent uses' (I haven't added it myself as I don't have a copy to hand to check). Maybe someone else could? 82.18.224.223 (talk) 02:53, 19 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Carol Ann Duffy

Contemporary poet Carol Ann Duffy makes effective use of "thou" in her love poem Rapture. Vernon White ^{. . . Talk} 20:34, 5 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Problems with the article

It's a very well written article; and it's marked FA, but it achieved that in 2003, and it wasn't exactly difficult. It was reviewed in 2006, but standards weren't as high as they could have been.

One problem is that the article name is a pronoun, whereas WP:MOS says that it should be a noun or noun phrase. But that's fairly minor, it's just a guideline.

And most of the article consists of usage guide information for this word. That's worse, it's policy.

Which brings us to the central problem I see with it, WP:Wikipedia is not a dictionary says that articles are supposed to be on a concept or thing, but this is single English word. Single words as the concept are disclaimed, because that's what dictionaries are about.

So it's a dictionary article. It's a long one, and most dictionaries would cut it for length considerably, but nevertheless that's what it is.

Just making a dictionary article longer gives you a long dictionary article, it doesn't make it encyclopedic. This is simply about four letters 't' 'h' 'o' 'u' and where you can, and where it has been, put in a sentence.

It just seems that this slipped through the cracks. There aren't exactly a lot of words (truthiness is one that basically everyone IARs on) that made FA, and I think we're just looking at one where nobody joined up the dots; I don't see anything about thou that makes me want to IAR anymore than I would with ye or something.

I checked, and this question had never come up before on the talk page or the reviews. It's seems to have been a lacuna; if it had been discussed before that would have been fair enough.

It also would be fine if it was merged with something. There's no article on Personal pronouns in Early Modern English for example, and I'm sure that could be a very fine article.

Anyway, that's what I think what does anyone else think?

As I say it's well written, a well written extended dictionary entry, and it would meet the policies easily if it was merged properly, but the fact that it's one of so very few word articles is probably telling us something, and I think this is what it is.

I'm not planning to FAR or AFD it, but I wanted to put this out there as a point of view; I think that improving the wikipedia sometimes involves looking at things in a different way. I'm sure that the wordinistas from linguistics section of the wikipedia will go ballistic at the mere idea that word articles like these are not Terribly, Terribly Important (tm), but I guess that goes with their territory.

(p.s. First person to say "I think it's done enough" can do something anatomically incorrect; it's not a criteria in any policy, how would we ever be able to prove it was enough or not enough, it's just words that mean nothing except 'I like it'!)- Wolfkeeper 15:24, 15 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

A noun phrase that reflects the contents of the article is "the pronoun thou in English"; therefore the article can be in Wikipedia, because "thou" is a good summary of that noun phrase. 167.107.191.217 (talk) 15:30, 1 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, but you can do that with any word in the English language: "the adverb pretty in English" and then just list all the usages.- Wolfkeeper 15:58, 3 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Saying that this is an “unencyclopedic dictionary entry” is completely missing the forest for the trees. The purpose of the restriction against dictionary entries in Wikipedia is that, if any word definition becomes encyclopedic, the scope of the encyclopedia balloons unmanageably and its focus is diluted. Including a page about thou really doesn’t have that problem, because it’s not just a definition, but also has all kinds of information which would be way out of scope for a dictionary entry but is relevant for an encyclopedia (namely, a complicated history). I think you’re right that Personal pronouns in Early Modern English would be a fascinating article; go ahead and write one. If you do, this article should still remain as the “summary style” expansion of one section of that article. –jacobolus (t) 19:00, 19 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That editor retired, after years of related discussion at WT:NOTDICT and an incomplete RfC.

(Currently: The policy still needs updating, but there's a fairly strong consensus that agrees with your comment above.) HTH. -- Quiddity (talk) 20:12, 19 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

KJV where most know it from?

"Most modern English speakers encounter "thou" only in the works of Shakespeare, in the works of other medieval and early modern writers, and in the King James Bible."

Ref 1 is dead, and ref 2 doesn't quite state this. But I'm surprised if this really the case. Are there any stats anywhere? My inkling is that hymns are a more common source of familiarity, as Christians in this day and age are more likely to read more modern Bible translations (which generally use "you" in its place). -- Smjg (talk) 00:08, 13 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Not necessarily. The KJV is still one of the most widely used English translations. And some modern translations also use the Early Modern English style. Aside from mood/nostalgic effect, though, some amount of meaning is lost with wholesale blanket use of you: for the original Hebrew and Greek texts had different pronouns for singular and plural. removing that distinction when translating removes meaning Firejuggler86 (talk) 09:06, 26 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I'm from Sheffield in Yorkshire, and I can assure everyone that I knew "thou" as a part of the first language I learned, and certainly not "only" from a Biblical or Shakespearean reference. Broad Yorkshire dialect still uses "thee" and "thou" as part of our standard language. Ianbrettcooper (talk) 20:37, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The text says: "In addition, the translators of the King James Version of the Bible attempted to maintain the distinction found in Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic and Koine Greek between singular and plural second-person pronouns and verb forms, so they used thou, thee, thy, and thine for singular, and ye, you, your, and yours for plural." This gives the impression that the writers used archaic forms of English as a way to translate the Bible more accurately, but this is nonsense, because those terms were in current use in English when the Bible was written, so it wasn't that they were copying forms of address used in ancient languages - they were simply applying the correct form in English to the translation. Ianbrettcooper (talk) 20:33, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Shakespear section gets it backwards!!

First, Falstaff addresses "Hal" as an intimate comrade, emphasizing "you"; then he switches to a facetiously contrasted "thou" for a future majestic but still graceless King.

No, no, was the other way 'round in Shakespear's day, as stated elsewhere several times in the article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.72.202.72 (talk) 17:01, 16 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Quite right. And I have changed it. But that whole Shakespeare section seems of doubtful value to me. Mcewan (talk) 04:46, 3 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Author hardik (talk) 12:54, 3 September 2011 (UTC) Thee,Thy,Thou and ye : Meanings and Usage brief

Author hardik (talk) 12:54, 3 September 2011 (UTC) thee: a word meaning 'you', used when talking to only one person who is the OBJECT of the verb.(we beseech thee,o lord.)[reply]

thy: a word meaning 'your', used when talking to only one person. (honour thy father and thy mother)

thou: a word meaning 'you',used when talking to only one person who is the SUBJECT of the verb.(thou art indeed just,lord)

ye: a word meaning 'you' , used when talking to more than one person.(gather ye rosebuds while ye may)

I think the "ye" part is wrong. Professor Seth Lehrer in his history of the English Language has a completely different explanation for ye. He asserts that when English was first written the latin alphabet was phonetic, with one letter for each sound, and there was no letter for our "th" sound, since it didn't exist in latinate tongues. And there were no diphthongs. Early English writers therefore borrowed a "th" rune from Norwegian. It resembled the greek lower case phi. So the word that we spell "the" was spelled in early English as φe. When printing came along, the rune was replaced with a lower case y, but the pronunciation was still "the." When ye is a pronoun, it was a phonetic spelling of "thee," so not a different word from thee, just a different transcription.pagnol (talk) 01:08, 3 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That's not correct. while it IS true that, in the period immediately after the printing press was introduced, y was sometimes used in place of thorn in words such as 'the', it was short lived and far, far from universal. and the 'th' digraph was already in use interchangeably with thorn and with eth (used at the end of middle of words, whereas thorn was used at the beginning) even before the printing press.

Ye, though, was the equivalent of 'you' in the subjective, while 'you' was the objective form. Therefore ye was the plural for thou, and you was the plural for thee. Both words (ye and you) were also used when speaking to one person, by at least the 14th century.

Also, in early Middle English (and maybe also in Old English, but not sure), 'ye' was spelled not with a y, but with a squiggly letter that no longer exists, and which also the 'gh' digraph in words like 'right' descend from. 'you' during that same time was spelled 'eow.' Firejuggler86 (talk) 14:31, 26 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

And also, cognate languages confirm that the plural pronouns ye/you descend from a more ancient form with a /j/, not an /ð/ or a /θ/ or a /t/. The spelling "ye" for the article "the" comes from a visual substitution of similar letters. But the pronoun "ye" is not derived from the pronoun "thee" by that or any other process.

And also some more, "ye" is the subject case, "you" the object, so any attempt to derive them from subject "thou" and object "thee" will end up getting the cases backwards. eritain (talk) 17:21, 30 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

and also ye means 'the', used in the names of pubs,shops,ect. to make them seem old.(ye olde starre inn) (See Thorn (letter) for the origin of this) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.185.141.220 (talk) 21:57, 23 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for explaining what I came to the article to find; when to choose thee over thou. The official offering Thou is the nominative form; the oblique/objective form is thee (functioning as both accusative and dative), just doesn't cut it. It's meaningless jargon to those who benefited from an education system that removed English Grammar from the curriculum for the sake of whatever education fashions were going at the time. :-/ 78.144.69.219 (talk) 04:49, 18 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Isn't the Genetive also the same thing as the possessive?

Earlier in the article, reference is made to the accusative and dative case. However, in this table of declension [or whatever such things are called for pronouns under specific cases], the accusative is not mentioned at all, the objective is substituted for the dative and the genitive case is mentioned in a separate column from the possessive case. For the sake of consistency, I would recommend: 1. either substituting the objective with the dative or including both as the heading; 2. deciding which column really describes the possessive. Is it the genitive, or is it the possessive? Consider adding both headings to the same column, as I suspect some readers understand one concept better than the other.

Please note that I am assuming that these four cases are similar to those in German: Nominative / Nominativ refers to the subject; Accusative / Akkusativ refers to the direct object; Dative / Dativ refers to the indirect object; and Genetive / Genetiv refers to the possessive case.

I have not made these changes because I am too busy.

Cheers, JSB — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.121.162.89 (talk) 19:50, 6 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I doubt that any two languages completely agree in case morphological territory. Genitive is used for example in Greek for a class of case endings which has a large semantic field, some of which is covered in English by the use of the preposition "of" (with no case ending change). The Greek genitive has as one of its usages possession. Take the expression "The love of God." That might mean a man's love for God or God's love for man. And in Greek the "of God" would be theou. We might say in English, "God's love," using the possessive. What would we mean if we said that "God's love motivates me"? Probably it would mean that I am motivated by the belief that God loves me; God is doing the loving. But with the genitive in Greek, the meaning could also be that I love God, and thus I am motivated by my love for God. I doubt that German either has the exact same semantic attachment to its case ends as you indicate. To go back to Greek, various prepositions also take particular cases after them (genitive, dative, accusative). Sometimes the meaning of the preposition is married to a case, so that if you change the case of the preposition's object, the meaning would also change. (EnochBethany (talk) 22:53, 6 October 2015 (UTC))[reply]

Uralic

The article currently says While the Hungarian and Finnish "te" may seem like cognates (their spellings are identical, but the Hungarian is singular and the Finnish is plural), they are in fact not, as these languages are Uralic in origin and not from Indo-European stock..

I wonder why the article makes such bold conclusion if modern linguistics places Uralic as the sister family to Indo-European under Eurasiatic (and/or Nostratic), being the closest family to it. The similarity is especially strong in pronouns, as they change at slowest rate. This is true not only for second person pronouns but also for the first person and interrogatives. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.32.211.131 (talk • contribs) 10:50, 10 February 2013‎

Thanks for the good question. There is a closely related question on StackExchange: Are the Finnish pronouns related to their Indo-European counterparts?. This suggests that in Finnish we should (also?) look at the first person singular pronoun sinä as there is supposedly a law that transformed Proto-Uralic ti to si. And in fact, the article Proto-Uralic gives tun as the reconstructed second person pronoun (number not specified). I am not a linguist, but this seems to be compatible with Proto-Indo-European pronouns.

Here is what happened with the article: In early 2012, someone mistakenly added Hungarian te to the list of Indo-European cognates. Then in May, an anonymous user from California removed it and instead wrote the text that you have found. [1]

Rather than just remove it as unsourced and at least controversial, I will replace it by a sentence stating the obvious: That similar personal pronouns exist in Uralic languages. This should prevent a repetition. Wikipedia's lists of cognates always get longer until someone cuts them down or something like this happens. Hans Adler 11:34, 10 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Consistency of genitive and possessive

The first paragraph in the article says the both 'thy' and 'thine' are used for the possessive case, whereas in the declension table, it separates the genitive and possessive forms ('thy' is shown to be in the genitive case alone). I do realize that the possessive case can also be called the genitive but if this distinction is made in the table, I feel, for the sake of consistency, that it should be reflected throughout the article (i.e. in the first paragraph). SundaLives 13:51, 2 January 2014 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by SundaLives (talk • contribs)

IMHO, in English grammar the term possessive should be used, rather than genitive. The difference between thy and thine in the KJV is the difference between a and an. The n form is used before following words that begin with a vowel: Thy book, but thine apple. (EnochBethany (talk) 22:57, 6 October 2015 (UTC))[reply]

Confusion over Thou and You

I think that this article needs clarification. Actually "Thou" is not a familiar (vs. formal) singular second person pronoun in the KJV. Thou and thee are the onlyBold text 2nd person singular pronouns used in the nominative and objective cases respectively. There is no formal (as opposed to familiar) 2nd person singular pronoun in the KJV. "You" in the KJV is always plural and always objective case, never nominative case. You is not the formal equivalent of a familiar thou in the KJV. In discussing thou, thee, ye, you, case needs to be kept clear. And BTW, the KJV differs from Shakespeare with pronoun use. (EnochBethany (talk) 22:40, 6 October 2015 (UTC))[reply]

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Nothing between Shakespeare and the present? Really?

Aside from the fact that I've lived in North Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Yorkshire for most of my life and would strongly contest that the use of "thou" (or "tha") is now restricted to the odd baby boomers and older persons, and is barely heard in any of these counties (I have NEVER heard it used in Staffordshire or Derbyshire and I'm from a family of former Master Potters who've been in North Staffordshire since the 14th century, and the cited source which was first published in 1990 - so 25 years old - is not available electronically); there is a bigger glaring issue with this article. I came here to find out when 'thou' was replaced with 'you' for common dialect and instead there's just a huge gap. What is the point in this article being in an encyclopedia (an issue that was shot down last time it was brought up) if its content is just poorly-researched snapshots about second-person-whatevers with no linking information in an encyclopedic manner. There must be references to support when "thou" fell out of common speech in England and I'm going to go elsewhere to try and find them now, but it's particularly ridiculous that somehow, despite gaining first page ranking for "when did thou become you," this "featured article" totally fails to cover that 400 year period between Shakespeare/KJV (contemporaries) and today. If anyone has the information to add a section to the article discussing the use of "thou" in the 400 years since Shakespeare's plays and King James's mis-translation of the Bible, it would be very useful to future readers.

Thou could always try actually reading the frigging article: "By contrast, The Merriam Webster Dictionary of English Usage says that for most speakers of southern British English, thou had fallen out of everyday use, even in familiar speech, by sometime around 1650." That may not be the full picture but it does address the issue. This is not a featured article. Johnbod (talk) 17:47, 4 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

When did thee and thou fall out of use? Amongst common urban folk in West Yorkshire the words were certainly still in regular verbal use a hundred years ago. Phrases such as 'Eeh lass tha knows nowt dost tha' are well attested to, whilst the Yorkshire anthem Ilkley Moor Baht 'At was composed in Edwardian times with its well-known refrain 'where hast tha been since I saw thee'. Within today's urban population thee and thou all-but vanished fifty years ago, but their use still survives, just, with older hill farmers when talking amongst themselves. Universal education in Standard English by the late 19th century, and national radio in the 20th, probably led to their demise. Another unanswered question is 'When did you stop rhyming with thou?' Folk in the Midlands of course still pronounce you as yow. Cassandra — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cassandrathesceptic (talk • contribs) 09:26, 15 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Heh, I have wondered the same thing XD. I think it was more likely the other way around, though: that rather than you stopped rhyming with thou, thou stopped rhyming with you. the words used the most typically transform the least. less used words are more likely to take on new pronunciations by analogy due to their spelling.

The best way to figure out what words rhymed with what other words in which periods is to read old rhyming poetry ;). Some of Shakespeare's plays rhymed pairs of lines nearly entirely throughout. Canterbury Tales also is mostly written in rhyme Firejuggler86 (talk) 09:27, 26 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

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Outdated Recording

I assume there's a policy about this, but I don't know where to find it.

The audio version of this page is twelve years old, and I'd be surprised if any of the recorded content is still represented in the article. At what point is it justifiable to delete the icon? It seems misleading to leave it. anthologetes ^{(talk • contribs)} 14:53, 21 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Small factoid

In Sweden, it was the formal noun "Ni" that disappeared in favour of the 2nd person "du" in the so called "du-reformen". Might be mentioned in this article as comparison. BP OMowe (talk) 22:55, 5 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

(Older) American English?

American English began to develop some 400 years ago, when thou was still ubiquitous in all of England, and it has formed mostly out of West Country and Northern English, which continued to use it much longer. So many colonists must have taken their thou to America. It would only be logical if it survived there to some extent. Have there been records of American English dialects where thou survived after 1800? Steinbach (talk) 12:09, 22 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The Quakers did, at least well into the twentieth century; I do not know if they still do or not.

The English speaking Amish might, also..I mean, these people drive down the highways in horse-drawn carriages instead of automobiles, sol use of thee and thou not too far fetched.

Thing is, though, even 400 years ago thee and thou were already starting to become dated. Neither the KJV nor Shakespeare are very good examples of how actual people spoke in real life at the times they were written. The KJV in particular is written in a form of English that never actually existed in the real world: it is an anachronistic blend of Modern English with archaic qualities that had fallen out of mainstream use during the Middle English period. Shakespeare is probably a somewhat better example, but: the vast majority of the dialogue is written in poetic, metred verse. And as poetic usage of thee/thou has been retained even to the present day... Firejuggler86 (talk) 09:50, 26 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Citations Missing

One thing I noticed was several sections with "citation needed" markers. This was not only distracting but I feel limits the amount of authority the article has. BreaErwin (talk) 06:49, 14 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

999

LOVEYOU 37.111.7.248 (talk) 06:24, 12 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Pretty broad category

"typically for addressing rulers, superiors, equals, inferiors, parents, younger persons, and significant others" ... what else is there? Just the superiors/equals/inferiors part seems to cover literally everyone that could conceivably be referred to by a second person pronoun. 104.14.65.239 (talk) 17:19, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]