I noticed that Mark Twain clearly captures that usage in dialog (using “thee” as subject as well as object, or any case at all). IIRC, he even uses “thee’s” as the possessive. Whether that’s an accurate reflection of 1850’s usage, or amplification for humorous puporses, is left to the reader as an exercise.
This appears in his first novel, “The Guilded Age,” among others.
As to formal and informal forms of address in the Queen’s English (as opposed to tother countries’ versions), I was brought up in an area where thou and thee were in common use (and still can sometimes be heard today). The rule for deciding whether one can use the informal was very clear:
Thou thees them as thous thee.
Incidentally does anyone know of any other pronoun with a verb form?
One thing I’ve wondered, does a redneck Quaker address a group of people as “Th’all”?
I suppose any pronoun could be substituted, though only “we” would be likely to appear in an actual conversation.
I take it you’re from the North, perhaps Yorkshire? I remember Dorothy L. Sayers giving, “Th’art fagged, lad,” as something that might actually be heard in her day, and “Thou art brassed-off, methinks,” as a Horrid Example of Getting It Wrong.
Not nowadays, but as a child I was brought up in Derbyshire.
Hah!
The Spanish informal “tu” - “tutear”, to address someone in the informal (with connotations of sassing them)
(Aghast grannie: “me tuteo!”/“she you-ed me!”)
There are similar verbs in French (tutoyer) and German (duzen). However, they don’t have the same form as the pronouns (tu/toi and du/dich, respectively), because they need their languages’ verb endings (-er and -en, respectively). English doesn’t limit the infinitive form of verbs in that way, so you can just use the straight “thee” or “thou” as a verb.
2009 Language Log article on the singular ya’ll issue.
TLDR: It appears the best evidence is that ya’ll can be used in the singular at least in Oklahoma–but the evidence isn’t very decisive because it’s based on self-report.
Here’s a comment from that article that explains my observations:
But that doesn’t explain the popularity of “all y’all”, which is generally used when someone is talking to one person but wants to explicitly include everyone.
As a Yankee living in NC, I use “y’all” as a plural, partly because it’s useful, and partly because it’s fun. No doubt I sound like a Damn Yankee trying to sound like I live here (only 12 years now.)
The English lack of thou can be a translator’s nightmare. Sometimes the change from you to thou (or the reverse) can be a significant moment in a character’s journey (it seems to turn up often in Ibsen), and translators are forced to fall back on great thumping substitutes like, “Oh, do call me ‘Suzie’, darling!”
I take it that would be in place of a line something like, “Oh, you can call me ‘Suzie’, darling!”, i.e. he called her Miss whatever, and she is personalizing it.
Funny, they talk in that article about the singular use of Y’all in Oklahoma, but I never encountered it in Oklahoma. I have in Houston, but the situations are typically a customer service rep (like restaurant hostess), so it’s conceivable they’re falling into rote language patterns and not realizing it.