MDMD2: The Forms of You

[Terrance]

Dave Monroe wrote:

>    "Most important, however, as with titles and hat
> honor, was that the form employed to designate the
> second person singular was intimately bound up with
> questions of social rank and etiquette.  The use of
> 'you' to a singleindividual communicated deference,
> honor, courtesy; 'thou' imparted intimacy or
> condescension when used to a close equal or
> subordinate, but contempt when addressed to a more
> distant equal or superior--either that or
> boorishnes....  Thus, by refusing to use 'you' to a
> sigle inividual because it represented a form of
> worlly honor, and using 'thou' intead, th Quakers
> provoked the hostility of others, who took their
> behavior as a sign of contempt ....  Besides being
> grammatically untrue, the use of 'you' in the singular
> constitute a for of worldly honor, hich was rendered
> all the moe odious by the circumstance that those who
> insisted on the use of the honorific 'you' to
> themselves addresses God, to whom honor was truly due,
> as 'thou' in thier prayers ....
>    "From this vantage point the use of thou' to a
> single person became a means of attacking the fleshly
> pride that demanded honor and deference....  The
> honorific form was deliberately rejected to exert a
> humbling effect upon the person addressed, a reminder
> of the vanity of worldly honor.  [George] Fox
> [1624-1691] expressed the principle clearly: 'This
> "thou' and "thee" was a fearful cut to proud flesh and
> self-honour' ...." (pp. 54-55)

George Fox was a man of poor education, who read little
 except his Bible, and who, with pen in hand to the last, could hardly
spell or
 construct a grammatical sentence. 

>From Fox's Journal or Autobiography


Moreover, when the Lord sent me forth into the world, He
forbade me to put off my hat to any, high or low; and I was
required to Thee and Thou all men and women, without any
respect to rich or poor, great or small.[50] And as I travelled up
and down I was not to bid people Good morrow, or Good
evening; neither might I bow or scrape with my leg to any one;
and this made the sects and professions to rage.

GEORGE FOX, JOURNAL, CHAPTER II. The First Years of Ministry 1648-1649.

Trom LINGUIST List 7.599 Tue Apr 23 1996 Sum: Thou and You

To get straight to the point: Judging from the information received,
my source (see above) quite simply got it wrong. As many LINGUIST
subscribers pointed out, Quakers *retained* the 'thee' form in English
- at least amongst themselves. But rather than retaining 'thee' for
the sake of egalitarianism in society in general, there are reasons to
believe that the 'thee' form was one prominent way in which the
Quakers could mark themselves out as being somehow (linguistically)
distinct from their surrounding community. I am informed that 'thee'
was retained with some success by the Quakers (well beyond the time
when it had virtually disappeared from English speech), though it
seems that amongst modern-day Quakers (in the US and UK, at least; I
have not heard from Australian/Canadian Quakers)the 'thee' form is now
becoming a rarity. We know for certain that the 'thou/thee/thy' forms
were disappearing from general English speech over 500 years ago, were
rare by 1650, and have today disappeared from American & most British
(English) dialects -- with the important exception of some dialects of
Northern England (as a native of West Yorkshire, I have first-hand
knowledge of this). As far as I can gather, no sociolinguistic study
has been carried out on the present-day uses of 'thee' in Northern
English speech. [GAVIN O SHEA (GOSHEA at acadamh.ucd.ie) reminded me of
the (still current and prevalent) use of 'ye' in southern and western
Ireland.]  So much can be said with reasonable certainty. It seems,
though, that scholars cannot agree on *when* and *why* thee/thou/thy
disappeared, or started disappearing, from English (see the responses
reproduced below), and many have speculated why it is that modern
English is seemingly (actually?) the only Indo-European language
without the so-called 'Tu'-'Vous' (t/v) distinction. No explanations
were offered for its widespread existence in the present-day
(informal) speech of Northern England.

Also at, 

The Religious Society of Friends

http://www.quaker.org/

http://www.quaker.org/thee-thou.html