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The Old English and Early Middle English second person pronouns thou and ye (with variants) were used for singular and plural reference respectively with no T–V distinction. The earliest entry in the Oxford English Dictionary for ye as a V pronoun in place of the singular thou exists in a Middle English text of 1225 composed in 1200. [ 16 ]
Old Dutch did not appear to have a T–V distinction. Thu was used as the second-person singular, and gi as the second-person plural. In early Middle Dutch, influenced by Old French usage, the original plural pronoun gi (or ji in the north) came to be used as a respectful singular pronoun, creating a T–V distinction.
Eric Partridge refers to these sporting terms as "snob plurals" and conjectures that they may have developed by analogy with the common English irregular plural animal words "deer", "sheep" and "trout". [6] Similarly, nearly all kinds of fish have no separate plural form (though there are exceptions—such as rays, sharks or lampreys).
Although there is some dialectal retention of the original plural ye and the original singular thou, most English-speaking groups have lost the original forms. Because of the loss of the original singular-plural distinction, many English dialects belonging to this group have innovated new plural forms of the second person pronoun.
You is now the standard English second-person pronoun and encompasses both the singular and plural senses. In some dialects, however, thou has persisted, [ 43 ] and in others thou is retained for poetic and/or literary use.
Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as I), second person (as you), or third person (as he, she, it). Personal pronouns may also take different forms depending on number (usually singular or plural), grammatical or natural gender, case, and formality.
The pronoun "Ye" used in a quote from the Baháʼu'lláh. Ye / j iː / ⓘ is a second-person, plural, personal pronoun (), spelled in Old English as "ge".In Middle English and Early Modern English, it was used as a both informal second-person plural and formal honorific, to address a group of equals or superiors or a single superior.
In linguistics, an honorific (abbreviated HON) is a grammatical or morphosyntactic form that encodes the relative social status of the participants of the conversation. . Distinct from honorific titles, linguistic honorifics convey formality FORM, social distance, politeness POL, humility HBL, deference, or respect through the choice of an alternate form such as an affix, clitic, grammatical ...
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