Development of you-plural

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Colleagues,
Here is a report from Harold Schiffman (U Penn) about the response he
got from his former inquiry about the loss of the second person singular/
plural distinction in English.

Dorothy Disterheft
Moderator, HISTLING

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Respondents reported the following:

1.  T/V usage began to change in Middle English, as part of a change
involving the loss of the dual.  By 1550, it was in full swing.  By the
end of Shakespeare's time, it was almost complete, except for relic areas
such as in the north of England, in rural areas, etc.  (Even today, in the
rural north, there is some T usage; one respondent gave  an example of
having been addressed by a 40-year old woman as follows:  "Fook thee, tha
daft booger!" illustrating both a 'nominative/vocative' form tha and an
accusative form thee.)

2.  The idea that Quakers were responsible for this shift was, as one
source put it, a kind of "urban legend" or at least a kind of folk
linguistic analysis, such as the idea that Castillian has a contrast
between [T] and [s], i.e. the contrast  between "caza" and "casa"  because
a famous Spanish king lisped, and people imitated his lisp to make him
comfortable.  The myth about Eskimo words for snow would be another such
folk belief about language that is not supported by observable data.

3. Various people listed sources on this, either things they have written,
or other well-accepted sources on the history of this phenomenon. I
provide a list below, and a bibliography at the end.

. Adamson, Sylvia 'From empathetic deixis to empathetic narrative' in TPhS
92.1:55-88 (1994), reprinted in 1995 in Subjectivity and Subjectivisation
ed. Stein & Wright, CUP.

2. Baugh/Cable (History of the English Language 237)

3.  Bauman, Richard. "Christ respects no man's person: the plain language
of the early Quakers and the rhetoric of impoliteness."  Austin, Texas:
Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, 1981. [Working papers in
sociolinguistics, no. 88]

4.  _________________Let your words be few: symbolism of speaking and
silence among seventeenth century Quakers. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1983. [Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture, no. 8]


5. Busse, Ulrich, 'Markedness and the use of address pronouns in Early
Modern English', to appear in 'Actualization: Linguistic Change in
Progress' Anderson, X (ed.) (published by Benjamins, Amsterdam.

6.  Hope, Jonathan 'Second person singular pronouns in records of early
modern 'spoken' English', Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, xciv, 1993,  pp
83-100


7  Lass, Roger. The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. III,
1476-1776 (CUP, 2000).

8.  Pyles/Algeo (Origins and Development of the English Language 190-91)

Once again, thanks to all the people on this list for their *extensive*
comments; there's no room here to list them all.  Those interested can go
to a document on my website:

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/540/handouts/ideology/silvrstn/Sources.htm

Hal Schiffman