[Lexicog] The Irony of Thou

[Fritz Goerling]

I doubt that the distinction between pronouns of "power" and "solidarity"
(to use Brown and Gilman's terms of their famous 1960 article "The Pronouns
of Power and Solidarity") will disappear any time soon in at least a couple
of European languages I know (German and French). If the formal form were
lost, I would regret it. I wonder to what kind of linguistic strategies one
would resort, if a variety of nuances in human relations could not be
expressed by different pronouns any more.
Concerning the use of pronouns in Shakespeare the following sounds
interesting:
Ulrich Busse. 2002. Linguistic Variation in the Shakespeare Corpus:
Morpho-syntactic Variability of Second-Person Pronouns.

Fritz Goerling

Benjamin Barrett wrote:

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.

Scott Nelson 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:




 
 



 
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