[Lexicog] The Irony of Thou

[Benjamin Barrett]

The explanation I heard of this is that it is due to religious intolerance:

Believing that all are equal under their god, the Friends (Quakers) used 
the form "thou" to everyone. With religious intolerance in England, 
people avoided using "thou" so they wouldn't be branded a Friend. This 
led to the eventual disappearance of the informal form, leaving only 
"you" in English today.

Today, European languages with familiar and formal forms of the second 
person pronoun are losing the formal form evidently as part of a 
democratization process. I believe Spain is particularly progressive on 
this front because of the liberal backlash following Franco's death in 
1975.

So while it seems Europe will be left without the familiar/formal 
dichotomy, the split differs in English in that the formal form remains 
while the familiar form will (might) remain in the other European languages.

Benjamin Barrett
a cyberbreath for language life
livinglanguages.wordpress.com

bolstar1 wrote:
>
> Most archaic words, by virtue of their use in historical
> documents, connote formality, and verse is filled with such dated
> terms. Non-intuitively, however, "thou" turns the tables on this
> norm. Elizabethan Englanders & newbie-Americans used "thou" only with
> friends, family, and social/academic inferiors (generally
> affectionately). But with strangers, it was considered bad form. As
> an example, Shakespeare used the term (perhaps coining the verbal use
> of the pronoun) in Twelfth Night accordingly:
>
>
> NOTE: In reference to the previous posts regarding degrees of
> inclusiveness in lexicons (including thesauruses and glossaries):
> with the use of paperless reference works increasing, increasing
> inclusions of jargon, origins, dated/archaic terms/word-to-phrase
> equivalents/etc. will continue. This extends to re-writeable, fold-
> up, info-tainers.
> Oh happy day…for thou and me.
>
> Scott Nelson
>
> .___




 
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