Neither, as others have already said.
Interestingly, I come from the north-east of England where a lot of dales farmers still do use “thou” and varients of, in everyday speech.
“get thee coat on lad, Thou’ll be nithered”
Can you tell us if these farmers continue to observe the thou/you distinction for the singular and plural numbers?
Given that American English retains some phonetic, lexical and grammatical features that are obsolete in the standard speech of the UK, it’s interesting that the everyday use of “thou”, “thee”, etc., seems to have completely vanished here, aside from certain narrow religious contexts. I think the Quakers have mostly given up the use “plain speech”, but even when they did use it, it had originated as a deliberate style.
I’ve read about how, even as late as the 1960s, Northerners tended to feel slighted by the London-centric focus of English culture and media. Could it be that in the early centuries of overseas exploration and colonization of North America, northern England was more or less an afterthought with so much attention being paid to explorers and overseas colonies? And not to mention that fracas with Spain. And so, with the northern half of the country left to its own devices, it became linguistic backwater?
ETA: The above statement should be read in a Sidney Greenstreet type voice, ideally as he appeared and sounded in The Maltese Falcon
Yea.
Hmm, couldn’t say for certain but it wouldn’t surprise me to find that small communities retain many archaic speech patterns and dialects.
There is certainly a lot of thee, quite a bit of tha (you) and tha’ll (you will) in many cases you’ll have a thou’se (those).
Thou ends up getting pronounced in various ways from dale to dale. In some cases to rhyme with “crew” in some to Rhyme with “cow”.
No-one said it had to make sense.
My Uncle, a “character of repute” in the dales, also taught me the old sheep counting method of
Yan, tan tether…etc