RE: Redneck step of the day...

["Pinkham, Jim" <Jim -dot- Pinkham -at- voith -dot- com>]

Interesting, Janet. Thanks for the further elaboration.

Jim 

-----Original Message-----
From: Janet Swisher [mailto:jmswisher -at- gmail -dot- com] 
Sent: Saturday, December 19, 2009 3:37 PM
To: Combs, Richard
Cc: Pinkham, Jim; Boudreaux, Madelyn (GE Healthcare, consultant);
Brian -dot- Henderson -at- mitchell1 -dot- com; techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Re: Redneck step of the day...

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 9:17 AM, Combs, Richard
<richard -dot- combs -at- polycom -dot- com> wrote:
> Pinkham, Jim wrote:
>
>> Interesting question, Madelyn. I immediately thought of "thee" and 
>> "thou," once differentiating the informal and formal "you", but that 
>> doesn't help on the plural side. As it happens, someone else has been

>> pondering, too:
>> http://linguistlessons.blogspot.com/2008/08/2nd-person-plural.html. I

>> turned to Wikipedia, too, and the author of that article maintains
> that
>> "ye" is the archaic second person plural, 
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_person.
>
> You, Madelyn, and Robert are all slightly confused. English isn't in 
> need of a second person _plural_ pronoun; it has always had a 
> perfectly good one -- you (evolved from ye).
>
> The problem is that the second person _singular_ pronoun, thou, fell 
> out of favor, and now you is used for both singular and plural. But 
> it's a pretender as the singular, and should return to its rightful 
> place as the plural.


And to clarify even further: originally, "you" was the objective case
form and "ye" was the subjective case form of the second-person plural.
Similarly, "thee" was the objective case  form and "thou" was the
subjective case form in the second-person singular. Some time after the
singular forms dropped out of use, "you" took over the subjective case
as well, and "ye" dropped out of use.

Quakers continued using the second-person singular form much longer than
the general English-speaking population, at first as a political marker
and later as an in-group marker.  But the same subjective/objective
shift took place, with "thou" being replaced by "thee".

> Search thine hear and see if thou art with me. :-)

That's archaic. In Quaker "plain speech", that would be "Search thy
heart and see if thee is with me" :-)


--
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