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Is You Being Served? (Linguistics)
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Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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In Varsity Blues Mick wrote:
Ever wondered why English lost its second person singular but French and German didn't? Well, it all comes down to an accident. English-writers started using a y rather than the thorn for 'th' (as in Ye Olde Tea Shoppe) which meant every time you tried to write thou it ended up as you. Hence the literate classes got used to using you all the time, and speech tends always to follow the written form for reasons of prestige. So now we all use you for both singular and plural except in the most ureconstructed Mummerset dialects (and of course the Amish).


Following up this Thou/You insight, there is a lengthy Wikipedia article on the topic ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You). Those with stamina would no doubt prefer recommended experts in the field such as Wales, Katie: Personal Pronouns in Present-Day English (Cambridge, 1996); or histories of the English language (which English language students are probably selling off at rock-bottom prices).

This in particular caught my eye:

Note that in the early days of the printing press, the letter y was used in place of the thorn (Ç·), so many modern instances of ye (such as in "Ye Olde Shoppe") are in fact examples of the and not of you. It also possibly indirectly helped to contribute to the displacement of thou by you, and the use of you in the nominative case.


The social distinction is briefly mentioned but somehow the formal address just seems to have got lost (due to French no longer being so widely used by the Establishment?):

This distinction made the plural forms more respectful and deferential; they were used to address strangers and social superiors. This distinction ultimately led to familiar thou becoming obsolete in standard English, although this did not happen in other languages such as French.


But there's the thorny question of cases which, oddly, just disappeared:

In Middle English the nominative case became ye, and the oblique case (formed by the merger of the accusative case and the former dative case) was you. In early Modern English either the nominative or the accusative forms have been generalized in most dialects.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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Note that in the early days of the printing press, the letter y was used in place of the thorn (Ç·)

Tosh. They'd have made a thorn if they needed one.

And "thou" continued to be used long past the time that the open-topped thorn ceased to be used in print.

So there was a thorn in print. I wish they'd make their mind up.

But this is irrelevant: it's a hand-written abbreviation for th that looks more or less like
y

This is a CityBlueprint lower-case y*. I can't find another font that shows the resemblance between th and y.

* Sorry, the fonts aren't reproduced here.
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Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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But this is irrelevant: it's a hand-written abbreviation for th that looks more or less like y

I agree (did you see that programme where the printer showed boxes upon boxes of keys ready for the press?); from what you say it sounds like the y may have changed from 'th' to 'y' due to popular (mis)use, 'th' being unbearably pedantic?
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DPCrisp


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I'm not with you on th being unbearably pedantic, Hatty.

All I know is, I've seen a hand written document* peppered with abbreviations where the t has no cross bar and the h's hump is small, so it comes out like y with a serif at the bottom. A superscripted e made the; o made though; re(?) made there... something like that: it wasn't just ye = the.

* Tudor, I think. Can't for the life of me remember where. Thought it was among facsimile documents in a periodical making-history-fun-for-kids thing, but couldn't find it again.

No thorn for the printers when thorn is a current letter doesn't make sense {And they say y was the nearest approximation, though p has to be better.} but later on, when the printed alphabet really is institutionalised, having to use Y to represent the hand-written ligature makes just as much sense has having to type a curly 3 instead of the zig-zag style (3*, 3*) instead of yogh.
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Hatty
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I'm not with you on th being unbearably pedantic, Hatty.

Why do pretentiously academic types insist on using Th for T e.g. in Greek names?

No thorn for the printers when thorn is a current letter doesn't make sense {And they say y was the nearest approximation, though p has to be better.} but later on, when the printed alphabet really is institutionalised, having to use Y to represent the hand-written ligature makes just as much sense has having to type a curly 3 instead of the zig-zag style (3, 3) instead of yogh.

Absolutely no sense. Printers had no problem with all kinds of other symbols, mathematical and linguistic, as a glance at early books reveals. And no explanation for the dropping of cases (esp nominative/accusative) nor how thy/thine became 'your', which makes me wonder if our linguistic experts really know as much as they'd like us to believe.
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Rocky



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Is there any proof that "thou" and "thine" were spoken, and not just used in writing?
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Mick Harper
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According to an Oxford academic, it's even more complicated as the original pronoun system in 'Middle English' was four part, hence ye for nominative plural and you for accusative/dative plural together with thou for nom.sing. and thee for objective cases sing.

Furthermore, syncretism (merging of cases) meant that ye/you conflated which she describes as a lengthy process "taking centuries"; although the 2 personal pronouns (ye/you for plural/formality) and though/thou (singular/informality/disrespect) remained stylistically and grammatically distinct.

Orthodoxy maintains that 'the' with a 'th', represented by the thorn, was transliterated by 'y' when printing started in 1476, though retaining the 'th' sound value.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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Why do they always gloss over the whole thing with "when printing started in 1476, 'th' was transliterated by 'y'" when T, H, thorn and anything else they wanted was freely available?

Well... we're used to all the experts looking but not seeing... e.g. "soote does not survive in Present Day English".

---

What on Earth does "Syncretism (merging of cases)... was a lengthy process taking centuries" mean? How long does it take to go from 2 to 1?

She must mean 1 and 2 cases were being used concurrently, but in the end only 1. But is the surviving record a good representation of a population with changing habits; or was the cross-section of the population represented changing? Did Geordies only recently start saying "div'ncha nah", because a short while ago they only ever wrote "didn't you know"?
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Hatty
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Is there any proof that "thou" and "thine" were spoken, and not just used in writing?

In 'Old English' you is written as þū but there's no way of knowing if thou was spoken or pronounced 'thow' rather than 'thoo'; tha's still used in Yorkshire I believe (and other parts no doubt).

"Yous" does bear a resemblance to "vous".

Especially with a silent 's', oui.
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DPCrisp


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Why do pretentiously academic types insist on using Th for T e.g. in Greek names?

'Sfunny, I usually think of Greek when it comes to TH being pronounced "t"... I thought it was just the agreed convention. Might well have been concocted by the thou-shalt-not-split-an-infinitive crowd, though. (I heard that's a hang-over from Latin, not an English precept at all.) Not that the rules are necessarily followed to the letter. No one says kaiser for Caesar or knee-kay for Nike. Does anyone say "Tessalonikay"(?) How do people say Thrace: like thrice; or track/"trake"/"traky"/"tracky"?

how [did] thy/thine became 'your'

I wonder about "we am", "I be" and whatever other colloquial delights we still have. Sounds like "I am, you are, he is..." is just a selection from extant options. Similarly, your/our (yourn, ourn...) seems to bear a natural relationship to you/us, so if it's not in the early records, it's just that something else was the preferred written option.

Although, I think they are all there as far back as records go and it's a matter of one giving way to another. (Dinner not evolving into pudding.) And the most powerful mechanism for that is surely the educated's preference.

By the way, isn't capital D what has become of thorn?
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Hatty
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'Sfunny, I usually think of Greek when it comes to TH being pronounced "t"... I thought it was just the agreed convention.

That's what I mean -- whose convention? In French, the traditional language of the 'educated', th is pronounced 't'.

No one says kaiser for Caesar

French again?

By the way, isn't capital D what has become of thorn?

Now you mention it, yes...


PS. According to Online Etymology, ye as in Ye Olde Tea Shoppe was never pronounced 'yee' (how do they know that? don't ask me).

PPS. They also say with stunning certitude that thorn wasn't used in printing because the types were imported from the continent where thorn didn't exist. There was a thriving printing industry in England though...
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Ishmael


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Well I'll be!

Previously, I have linked the alphabetical letters C and D with Phi. Like so:

Φ

The left half is C. The right half is D. The line down the middle is the Phi Division between the first 7 letters of the alphabet (which is the mini-alphabet found at the start of the 26 letter english alphabet).

But look again at the right half.

It's a Thorn symbol! Perfect and complete.

þ


So if Thorn is the right side of the Phi Symbol, and Thorn became our letter D, then the D is indeed the right side of the Phi Division found in the first seven letters of the Alphabet!!! C is the other half!!!
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Hatty
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Previously, I have linked the alphabetical letters C and D with Phi. Like so:

Φ


Interestingly, in France the symbol for division was the capital D reversed, which has been explained as simply the initial letter of the word 'division'. {The Phi symbol is like a capital D joined both ways round like looking forwards and backwards}.

The 'th' sound is unusual. In Spanish 'th' is rendered by c (it's called 'theta') and also z. (In English we sometimes have trouble with c's, t's and z's as in tzar also spelt czar.)
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Hatty
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Is thorn 'of Thor'? Does Φ represent God, a combo of G + O + D, or am I talking cod(swallop)?
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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In Spanish 'th' is rendered by c (it's called 'theta')


Also a divided circle, horizontal, this time: Θ θ

Hand-written lower-case θ is a counter-clockwise swirl: topographically the same as c.

If you make the horizontal stroke deliberately, separately (as in the upper-case), it's much the same action as t.
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