Did English-Speakers c. 1611 Really Say "Thee" and "Thou" and "Thine"?

The King James Bible uses “thee” and “thou” and “thine” instead of “you” and “yours.” Did they actually pronounce the “th” sound in daily speech, or was it just how it was written? If so, with the hard th (“these”) or soft “th” (“think”)? Was “thou” pronounced to rhyme with “plow” or to rhyme with “poo”? When did we go from “th” to “y” in these words? (I’ve heard of the Great Vowel Shift, was there a Minor Consonant Shift too?).

And what, if anything, does this have to do with the letter Thorn? I know it’s led to some confusion due to its similarity to the letter Y - so “Ye Olde Coffee Shop” should be pronounce “the old coffee shop” but some Americans pronounce it (in their heads anyway) “yee oldee coffe shop.”

Did English speakers say ‘th’ in ‘thee’, ‘thou’ etc? Yes. It’s a harder ‘th’ and ‘thou’ rhymes with ‘plow’.

However, there was no vowel shift- thee is not the same word as you, and both were used.

‘Thee’ was actually the informal version, the one you’d use with your friends, while ‘you’ was the polite version, used for your social betters. At some point, the informal version fell out of fashion, though the religious use held on, and variants of the words were still in use in some dialects in my memory- my elderly aunty would say ‘tha’ instead of ‘you’ to us kids.

People often get that the wrong way round, assuming one would be polite to a deity who does, after all, turn people into pillars of salt and things, but the KJB opted for the informal use.

Thee and thou is/was a familiar form of address intended for a child, a lover, or a close family member in informal circumstances. To use it to a stranger would be considered rude; addressed to your social superiors, it’s a downright insult which risks a punch on the nose or worse.

The shift from “thou” to “you” is not simply a replacement of the initial sound of the same word; the two are different pronouns. “Thou” (rhyming with “plow”) is the original English pronoun of the second person singular; it corresponds to German “du”. “You” was, originally, the second person plural form, corresponding to German “ihr”. It then got to be used as a formal and polite form of address, much the same way French uses “vous” (second person plural) as a polite form of address even for one single person in lieu of singular “tu”. Even later, this formal “you” replaced the informal “thou” in virtually all occasions, even informal ones (an analogous process is going on in Latin America, where the formal “usted” is replacing the informal “tú” in some countries).

By the way, I’ve always found it interesting that in most languages that have the T-V distinction (the distinction between formal and informal ways of address, viz. French tu/vous), the informal one is used to talk to God, e.g. in prayers. You would think that if there’s anyone you would be supposed to use the more respectful form for, it’d be God. But no, that’s where you use the informal one, even, to this day, in English. This usage is probably intended to show the closeness of the divine being to individual humans in the monotheistic religions.

So when did we go from “thee” and “thou” and “thine” to “you” and “yours”? And did the Thorn have anything to do with it?

See:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/thou

List of spellings from Middle English include:

thou, tho, thogh, thoue, thouȝ, thow, thowe, tou, towe, thu, thue, thugh, tu, you, ðhu, þeou, þeu, þou

which gives an idea of the range of pronunciations. That is, a “th” sound /ð/ (like this, not thin), and the vowel ranging from /aʊ/ to /oʊ/ to /o/ to /u/, depending on dialect.

Old English was “þu”, pronounced /ðu/.

Early Modern English second-person pronouns were

thou /ðaʊ/ (singular, subject)
thee /ði/ (singular, object)
thy /ðaɪ/ (singular, possessive)
ye /ji/ (plural, subject)
you /ju/ (plural, object)
your /jʊɹ/ (plural, possessive)

The confusion comes because thorn “þ” was not available in most fonts and so printers would use “y” instead, especially to save space compared to “th”. So “the” would be spelled “ye”, but pronounced like “the” /ðə/, because that was the word; different from context than the pronoun “ye” /ji/. Similar to how modern English readers pronounce “lead” as /lid/ or /lɛd/ depending on context.

Yes. In the LOTR, (in an appendix I think), Tolkien notes that the hobbit version of Westron had only one second person pronoun (like modern English), the one equivalent to the informal pronoun in the version of Westron used in Rohan and Gondor. So, Merry and Pippin were assumed to be hobbit princes, since they kept using the informal form with everybody including Kings and Stewards.

In German class (decades ago), we had to translate a passage in which a judge needed to address a criminal who was the mayor’s son. Normally, the judge would “du” a criminal, but “Sie” the mayor’s son - but in this case, he was confused about what form to use (as I recall, he used some awkward way of avoiding both), but the tricky part for the students was to figure out how to translate the distinction into English.

I remember learning “On Ilkla Moor Baht 'at” as a child.
The first line is - if memory serves me…

Where has tha’ bin sin I saw thee?

Using tha’ and thee for pronouns, presumably a few centuries ago in Yorkshire. .
It took me years to realize that it was a song about not wearing a hat…

There was also the old folk saying from then and there…

Owt’s daft boot thee and me, and thee’s a bit queer.

Centuries ago? It would have still been widespread in the early 1900s- I think it was the widespread use of cars and the collapse of the mill and mining industries that meant people moved away from their birth town, which mostly ended the use of such thick dialect.

The usage of ‘thee’ and ‘tha’ held on Lancashire too, which is where that side of my family was from. I’m not sure it’s completely gone- there’s probably some old folks somewhere using it still, though the local dialect really has weakened to a much milder accent. I mean, my aunty died in 1998 or '99- she was pretty old fashioned (and used far less dialect than her mother, who used so much dialect it was barely recognisable as English by all accounts), but I doubt she was the last.

“Go from” is a bit of an odd way to put it. I would say that “thee/thou/thine” just fell out of favor. “You/yours” was always used alongside them. Even the King James Bible has “you/yours” in it. Shakespeare also used both forms.

As others have said, “thee/thou” was actually the familiar form during the time the King James Bible was written (early 1600’s). But since it sounds “old fashioned” to us it tends to get used for overly formal speech now.

As to exactly when “thee” and “thou” fell out of favor, it seems to have been the early 1600’s in and around London and certainly by the 1700’s in most of the rest of England. Although as others have pointed out there are still dialects that use them.

I will add that I think it was the History of English podcast that included the theory that city living is largely what drove the adoption of “you”. It is easier to use a social distinction between “thee” and “you” in a village where you know everybody, but in a larger city it is much safer to use the formal “you” universally. You are much less likely to offend your “betters” that way.

Not really. Thorn was used for one of the sounds we use “th” for today. Norman scribes hated the runes, and didn’t use them, but English ones did. “Y” was sometimes used for thorn once the printing press was used since it typically didn’t have the runic symbols. But “ye” standing in for “the” would never be confused for the pronoun “ye” by English speakers of that time.

And I assume that Quakers still use thee for both subject and object form. At least they did when I was growing up.

Eth and Thorn were the voiced and unvoiced form of the th sound and used until they dropped out of most fonts. The eth was the crossed d. Incidentally, it would make sense to use dh and th for the voiced and unvoiced sounds, but that’s not what happened.

Perhaps @Schnitte can elaborate on this, but I had a friend who studied in Germany and he said that the students generally addressed each other by the ihr form as a semi-familiar one, rather than either du or Sie. He compared the three forms to addressing John Smith as John (familar), Smith (semi-familiar) or Mr. Smith (formal).

There’s a general trend in Germany towards the informal “du” form, especially amongst young-ish people (which, I suppose I can say, still includes me in my late 30s). I have the impression, however, that the trend is less pronounced here than in other countries that traditionally have the T-V distinction, meaning that “Sie” is still holding a lot of ground. To a large extent it’s a question of demographic. With students amongst each other, the informal pronoun is pretty established as a default even if they don’t know each other personally, and that goes for both plural (addressing several people with “ihr”) and singular (“du”). That’s certainly the case now, and it was the case when I was in university in the 2000s; my dad, who attended university in the 1960s, says that he would “Sie” another student he didn’t know personally.

I agree that “ihr” is gaining ground faster than “du” - there’s less of a threshold to overcome to address several other people you don’t know by “ihr” than there is to address a single person you don’t know by “du”. It’s quite common, for instance, to hear “ihr” from a waiter when I’m having dinner with a similarly-aged friend (especially if the waiter is also in that age bracket), even in situations where I doubt the waiter would say “du” if I were alone. So in that sense I agree that “ihr” is, in terms of formality, located somewhere between “du” and “Sie”. That trick, however, works only if you’re talking to several people; it’s not common to use “ihr” specifically to address one individual person.

To report another form of middle ground: In high school, it is common (I think there’s even formal guidance to teachers to do it) for teachers to “Sie” students from grade 10 onwards, but address them by first name rather than Mr/Ms plus last name.

Mostly, but it depended a lot on the writer. Some writers used only thorn, or only edh. Some writers used both, but were terrible spellers. :slight_smile:

Note that “the” was spelled with a thorn enough that replacing it with a “y” was widespread.

I was reading one of the earlier translations of Les Miserables (probably late 19th century) and was initially confused when a dying Eponine kept talking about how she could die happy because Marius “called me thou.” I eventually figured out that she was happy he shifted to the familiar from the formal and interpreted that as meaning that Marius “loved me at least a little.”

A later 20th century translation completely omits the whole “thou” business. I assume this is because since thee/thou had passed out of common usage it no longer made sense in English. Possibly in the late 19th century it was already archaic but still understood.

In a different realm, 'thou" could be an insult. In Twelfth Night, Sir Toby Belch is advising Sir Andrew to write an insulting letter to “Cesario,” and he states, “Taunt him with the license of ink. If thou “thou”-est him some thrice, it shall not be amiss”, i.e., use the familiar and imply he is your social inferior.

Are “thou” and related pronouns really not understood or do not make sense? Definitely, they are old-fashioned and people do not use them naturally except in certain dialects, but I would have expected most English speakers to comprehend them. Compare with pretty obsolete words such as “hoball”, “whirret”, “walm”, etc. where one should expect people to reach for a dictionary.

Voiced and voiceless. Hold your hand on your throat while alternating between the two and you can feel the difference while not changing the place of articulation.

Not in any meeting I’ve attended. Granted that’s only a dozen or so and your avatar suggests a memory that stretches back farther than the 80s. The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Faith and Practice does have “thee” in the canned wedding vow (we used “you”) and in old quotes (along with thou for subject). YMMV

What is not understood is the difference between familiar and the formal forms. Nowadays “thou” is just an old-timey way to say “you”. The increased intimacy implied by switching from “you” to “thou” is completely lost in modern English.

Or reversed, by people who assume that referring to God as Thee must be more formal, not less.