This is true in Spanish too, with God being addressed as tú.
I wonder - how does this work with polytheistic religions? If a group of Asatru followers in Spain wanted to address multiple deities at the same time, would they use vosotros (familiar plural you) or ustedes (formal plural you)?
It’s going to depend on how the gods are conceived of in the religions concerned, I imagine. In the Judeo/Christian/Islamic tradition, God is predominantly imaged as a father, and that’s an intimate familial relationship, so the grammar and syntax appropriate to intimacy are used when speaking to or of God. Other religious traditions might have quite different conceptions of divinity that lead to the use of different grammar and syntax. But I think the key factor will be how various traditions conceive of deity, not how many gods they think there are.
Another related term, seen in the Bible and sometimes in other “archaic” or seemingly “formal” writing, is the vocative “O” (not to be confused with the interjection “Oh”, although it often is).
Used before a person’s name (or title) when addressing that person: “O noble Hammurabi, your humble servant begs to report that the rats have eaten all the grain.” (from Hammurabi, a sim-city type of game); “That’s an infamous suggestion, O Caesar!” (opening line from Asterix and Cleopatra); “O ye of little faith” (Matthew 8:26); “O Lord” (from all over the place in the Bible).
Also often used figuratively or rhetorically when addressing inanimate objects, as in “Who art thou, O great mountain?” (Zechariah 4:7, KJV).
My grandmother is Hindu and uses the familiar form to address her deities. I can’t remember if she prays in Tamil or Sanskrit, but either way, it’s the familiar.
If you’re translating something to modern language, why would you use archaic language forms?
You wouldn’t, normally. But sometimes archaic language forms indicate that a particular phrase is a proverb or motto, or is otherwise long-established, and a translator might choose to preserve that signal when translating.
Note to robert_columbia: “Y’all”, while widely believed to be plural, is actually used in the singular by Southerners. E.g., a checkout clerk will ask me (and I do mean just “me”.) “Did y’all find everything you need?”
IIRC, “thou” was used throughout James Clavell’s novel Shogun to indicate when the characters were speaking Latin instead of English or Japanese or Dutch or Portugeuse.
I have to wonder whether the “singular you is informal” rule applies as much in middle/pre-modern English to the extent that it does in languages like Spanish or French? Does the early vernacular translation of the Bible in Spanish or French use the singular, plural, or some other form where KJV uses “Thou”?
As I understood, the “usted” (formal singular “you”) in Spanish is derived from a form similar to “my lord” used as a formal address in English. I.e. when speaking to a higher ranking person, one usage would be “If my lord desires for it to be so.” Talking to a higher up by referring to them in the third person… which appears to have been formalized in Spanish.
Not sure why the formal evolved to plural in French (“vous”). Is there any indication why English defaulted to the plural form (“you”?) And what’s the story with “ye”? Is it a form of “you” or “the”? (“Ye olde tea shoppe”)
If you want to be truly correct, you’d spell it þe, not ye because it used a now defunct character known as the thorn which represented the sound we usually represent as [th]. A contemporary seeing a sign that said “þe olde tea shoppe” would read it as “the old tea shop” not “ye old tea shop”.
It’s derived from vuestra merced, “your mercy,” or equivalent to “your honor” or “your grace.” This also explains why it takes third person verb forms instead of second person.
In my experience with neopagans, and in popular culture, the need to sound slightly archaic and therefore magical trumps grammar. In both cases (polythesists & films / tv) you hear people switching from “thou” to “you” to “thee” in the same sentence without any cognizance of the grammatical hell they wreak. Since they basically both mean “you” to a Modern English speaker, it’s hard to keep them separate if you’re not (thou art not) really paying attention.
If I have matters rightly: some hundreds of years ago, the “thorn” character – then on its way out, being supplanted by “th” – had come to be written in a way which looked a lot like the letter “y”. In the earlier days of printing in England, when there were still many “bugs in the system”, printers often needed in various ways, to improvise and bodge things to fit. If they were short of space, it was a common space-saving dodge to use a “y”, standing for “thorn”, in place of the two letters of “th”. Hence, largely, the beloved “Ye olde” thing.
Exactly. However, there is also the pronoun “ye” as in, “come all ye faithful.” In that usage, it’s a second person plural personal pronoun in the subjective case (although it seems to have varied a little, sometimes in the subjective, and sometimes as a second person singular formall), but by 1600, “you” had pretty much replaced it. “Ye” is still used in some dialects today.
So where did all the odd third person conjugates go? The OP’s “Hath” for example? Or “Thinketh”, or “Doth”?
It seems like we hardly even conjugate verbs anymore (I conjugate, you conjugate, he conjugates, they conjugate, etc.), that’s why high school Spanish students find it such a weird concept.
My understanding is that the standard line is that the final syllables were reduced and de-stressed until they lost meaning and disappeared.
It’s been suggested that because speakers of different but related groups of languages (Anglo-Saxons, Danes) had to communicate, and these languages differed in the way they conjugated the verbs, they ended up mostly dropping the endings.
Interestingly, spoken French has also largely lost the differences in verb conjugations, but this is obscured because it still retains the different spellings.
In modern spoken French, two thirds of all words sound alike.