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Originally, thou was simply the singular counterpart to the plural pronoun ye, derived from an ancient Indo-European root. In Middle English, thou was sometimes represented with a scribal abbreviation that put a small "u" over the letter thorn: þอง (later, in printing presses that lacked this letter, this abbreviation was sometimes rendered as ...
Personal pronouns in Early Modern English; Nominative Oblique Genitive Possessive; 1st person singular I me my/mine [# 1] mine plural we us our ours 2nd person singular informal thou thee thy/thine [# 1] thine plural informal ye you your yours formal you 3rd person singular he/she/it him/her/it his/her/his (it) [# 2] his/hers/his [# 2] plural ...
Early Modern English had two second-person personal pronouns: thou, the informal singular pronoun, and ye, the plural (both formal and informal) pronoun and the formal singular pronoun. "Thou" and "ye" were both common in the early 16th century (they can be seen, for example, in the disputes over Tyndale's translation of the Bible in the 1520s ...
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]
Irregularly, English nouns are marked as plural in other ways, often inheriting the plural morphology of older forms of English or the languages that they are borrowed from. Plural forms from Old English resulted from vowel mutation (e.g., foot/feet), adding –en (e.g., ox/oxen), or making no change at all (e.g., this sheep/those sheep).
An archaic set of second-person pronouns used for singular reference is thou, thee, thyself, thy, thine, which are still used in religious services and can be seen in older works, such as Shakespeare's—in such texts, the you set of pronouns are used for plural reference, or with singular reference as a formal V-form.
In Latin, specie is the ablative singular form, while species is the nominative form, which happens to be the same in both singular and plural. In English, species behaves similarly—as a noun with identical singular and plural—while specie is treated as a mass noun, referring to money in the form of coins (the idea is of "[payment] in kind ...
You comes from the Proto-Germanic demonstrative base *juz-, *iwwiz from Proto-Indo-European * yu-(second-person plural pronoun). [1] Old English had singular, dual, and plural second-person pronouns. The dual form was lost by the twelfth century, [2]: 117 and the singular form was lost by the early 1600s. [3] The development is shown in the ...