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Why Did We Stop Using 'Thou'?


Why Did We Stop Using 'Thou'? - Merriam-Webster

As Old English began to grow up a little, finally getting a job and moving out of its parents' house, the singular use of thou began to change. The pronoun that ...

When did people stop using 'thee/thou/thy/ye' and switch to 'you'?

Those terms stopped being used in standard English in the 17th century. Continued to be used longer in areas further from London and in some ...

Why did English stop using thou? - Linguistics Stack Exchange

Look up Quaker persecution in England, late 17th century. Quakers refused to use "you" for nobility, insisting on singular "thee". This went ...

Thou - Wikipedia

For this reason, many associate the pronoun with solemnity or formality. Many dialects have compensated for the lack of a singular/plural distinction caused by ...

When did people stop using words like thee, thy, thou, etc.? - Quora

The transition away from archaic forms like "thee" and "thou" in English occurred gradually over time. During the early modern English period ( ...

Why Did People Stop Saying "Thou"? - LingQ

So it seems that English lost its informal pronouns because people were afraid of offending those who thought of themselves as upper class and because some ...

When did the English give up using "thee" and "thy ... - The Guardian

Thee and thou were the familiar forms for you. They are still used in northern England, but they're dying out even there. Using the familiar out of place could ...

Why Did People Stop Saying 'Thou'? - Quick and Dirty Tips

Thee and Thou Were English's Informal Pronouns. Since thee and thou have survived mainly in religious and poetic writing, you may be surprised ...

why did English speakers stop using thees and thous?

While you can never reduce a linguistic change down to a simple single reason, the main factor is increasing egalitarianism. Thou and thee are ...

Thou Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster

Articles Related to thou. thou. Why Did We Stop Using 'Thou'?.

What is the difference between "thee" and "thou"?

The Latin (from which they worked much more than modern translators would) used tu and so they did as well. They were missing the point that ...

why did English speakers stop using thees and thous? | Page 2

So several words wound up having 'Y' as a replacement. I don't know if this is why 'thou' got absorbed into the more formal 'you', but it is ...

Those who thee and thou: the second person singular pronoun after ...

By 1800, both unmarked and marked uses of thee and thou, had become virtually obsolete in Standard English (Denison, 314). Yet, throughout the nineteenth ...

thou revival | Antimoon Forum

Aside from northern English English dialects which still preserve "thou" as "tha", forget about trying to actually get people to use "thou" as ...

'Tis the season for archaic English | The Week

Danger! Sometimes they didn't say the e, and would write it with an apostrophe: thou know'st, thou knew'st. Only do this ...

Thou, Thee, Thy, Thine & Ye: Meanings & Usage - /////Logos Literature

In works of old, high-fantasy or historic fiction one may have chanced across the strange words: thou, thee, thy, thine and ye.

Thou, Thee, Thine - let us reason

Whereas, if a commoner addressed a social superior with the archaic pronouns, he would have been behaving most unseemly. To address the king as: ...

A brief history of singular 'they' - Oxford English Dictionary

You functioned as a polite singular for centuries, but in the seventeenth century singular you replaced thou, thee, and thy, except for some dialect use. That ...

O useful thou! Wherefore hast thou disappeared? - CSMonitor.com

But what happened to "thee"? Why did it fall into disuse? Our friends at Wiktionary, in a passing note on a grammar table, say of the second- ...

Ye (pronoun) - Wikipedia

While its use is archaic in most of the English ... we we, us / ous us, ure[n] / our[e] / ures / urne ... thou, thee, thy/thine, thine. plural ...