Sources.
Below
are the Sources that I have consulted on the history of T/V usage; this is in a
very rough form, approximately the way I downloaded it from emails etc.
a. Linguist-List discussion of this in 1996:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST
List: Vol-7-599. Tue Apr 23 1996. ISSN:
1068-4875. Lines: 261
Subject:
7.599, Sum: Thou and You
---------------------------------Directory-----------------------------
1)
Date: Mon, 22 Apr 1996 10:24:56 +0300
From: firth@hum.auc.dk (Alan Firth)
Subject: Summary: Thou and You
---------------------------------Messages------------------------------
1)
Date: Mon, 22 Apr 1996 10:24:56 +0300
From: firth@hum.auc.dk (Alan Firth)
Subject: Summary: Thou and You
A few
weeks ago I [Firth] posted the following inquiry:
Could anyone throw light on what seems to be
a rather murky area - the
>
reasons for the loss of 'thou/thee' from (standard) spoken English. I
>
attended a talk recently and heard a linguist forward the notion that it
>
was caused largely by 17th Century Quakers in the United States, whose
>
egalitarian ways had impacted their speech. The claim was that this
>
development spread throughout the English-speaking areas of the world. I
> am
not convinced of this. Any help (inc. references) would be much
>
appreciated.
I
received several responses, many of which were impressively detailed
and
extraordinarily informative. At one point in time I was actually
considering
the possibility of collecting the responses and
approaching
a publisher with a proposal ... (joke). Many sincere
thanks
to all who responded.
To get
straight to the point: Judging from the information received, my source (see
above) quite simply got it wrong. As many LINGUIST subscribers pointed out,
Quakers *retained* the 'thee' form in English - at least amongst themselves.
But rather than retaining 'thee' for the sake of egalitarianism in society in
general, there are reasons to believe that the 'thee' form was one prominent
way in which the Quakers could mark themselves out as being somehow
(linguistically)
distinct
from their surrounding community. I am informed that 'thee' was retained with
some success by the Quakers (well beyond the time when it had virtually
disappeared from English speech), though it seems that amongst modern-day
Quakers (in the US and UK, at least; I have not heard from Australian/Canadian
Quakers)the 'thee' form is now becoming a rarity. We know for certain that the
'thou/thee/thy' forms were disappearing from general English speech over 500
years ago, were rare by 1650, and have today disappeared from American &
most British (English) dialects -- with the important exception of some
dialects of Northern England (as a native of West Yorkshire, I have first-hand
knowledge of this). As far as I can gather, no sociolinguistic study
has
been carried out on the present-day uses of 'thee' in Northern English speech.
[GAVIN O SHEA (GOSHEA@acadamh.ucd.ie) reminded me of the (still current and
prevalent) use of 'ye' in southern and western Ireland.] So much can be said with reasonable
certainty. It seems, though, that scholars cannot agree on *when* and *why*
thee/thou/thy disappeared, or started disappearing, from English (see the
responses reproduced below), and many have speculated why it is that modern
English is seemingly (actually?) the only Indo-European language without the
so-called 'Tu'-'Vous' (t/v) distinction. No explanations were offered for its
widespread existence in the present-day (informal) speech of Northern England.
Harold
F. Schiffman (haroldfs@ccat.sas.upenn.edu) sent me the following on the Quakers
in the US and their use of 'thee': Because of the non-standard non-RP
background of most Quakers in the 17th century, the form that survived when
brought to America is 'thee' and not 'thou'.
In America, Quakerism underwent some schisms in the late 18th and early
19th centuries, and today Quakers here recognize 4 different flavors of Yearly
meetings: (1) Unprogrammed, which is
closest
in form to the original kind of Q meeting, but is socially liberal, highly
educated, in some cases wealthy people.
Philadelphia YM is the stronghold of this group. It went through some schisms but then there was
reconciliation in this century. (2)
Evangelical, which has programmed worship and is socially conservative. (3) Friends United Meeting, which is
programmed but less conservative than Evangel. (4) Conservative, which are
unprogrammed, largely rural, in the Midwest.
Only this group still shows use of *thee* (and thy, and thine) as a
common practice. I do know some group 1
people who use
thee
etc., but it was a conscious decision on their part to revive it.
Jonathan
Hope (JONATHAN2@mdx.ac.uk) offered the following useful overview. I'm not aware of any satisfactory
explanation of the loss of thou/thee in English - especially given their
retention in many related and geographically close languages. The Quaker reference you cite strikes me as
odd - in England at least, the Quakers were responsible for *retaining* thou
longer than other sections of the community.
I doubt that the situation in America would have been different. Perhaps the implication was that because the
Quakers
retained
thou, other groups dropped it for fear of being tainted with their extremism.
Generally people cite the early
urbanisation of England, social mobility, and the desire not to offend as
factors favouring the loss of thou.
There is also the systemic argument that thou is likely to come under
pressure as it demands an extra inflection on the verb, and these are being
dropped in English. I have seen it argued that the plague was responsible for
the loss of thou - because it reduced the available workforce, raised the price
of labour, and meant that bosses had to call their workers 'you'. This seems to me to be fun, but entirely
unsupportable (how come other countries, which also had the
Plague,
retained t/v systems?). Thou was
certainly on the way out in spoken English by the second half of the fifteen
hundreds - see my [Jonathan Hope] article 'Second person singular pronouns in
records of early modern 'spoken' English', Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, xciv,
1993, pp 83-100
But why it was disappearing is a very
difficult question. There must be some
parallel to the reverse loss occurring in many European langauges at the
moment, where the 'thou' equivalent is replacing the 'you' form - this is
generally perceived as being in response to changing social relationships. The big question here I think,
is why 'thou' loss only occurs in English (or at least most dialects of
English).
Susan
Meredith Burt (burt@VAXA.CIS.UWOSH.EDU), herself a Quaker, contributed with the
following: I think that English Quakers initiated the use of plain language
before coming to America (George Fox, the founder of Quakerdom, was
English). But the joke was that
thee/thou was already obsolescent when Quakers began using it--it seems that
that is why Quakers never got the case-marking right--they used thee as
nominative, for example. Friends' motivation for using thee/thou was indeed
egalitarian--Fox interpreted thee/thou as singular
(correctly),
and you as plural, therefore as "vain" when used in addressing a
single person. Friends considered it
appropriate to avoid politeness practices that they saw as excessively
flattering, such as addressing a single person with a plural pronoun, or
removing one's hat as a sign of (excessive?) respect.
Larry
Trask (larryt@cogs.susx.ac.uk): I find
the idea that the loss of English `thou' was due to the Quakers to be inconceivable
-- though I note that Dick Leith takes this notion seriously in his book _A
Social History of English_.
All the sources I have seen, including
Leith, who gives a very good account, agree on the main conclusions. English-speakers began to use `you' as a
respectful singular in the 13th century, probably under French influence. Except in conditions of intimacy, `you'
quickly became established as the ordinary way for an upper-class speaker to
address an equal, as well as a superior, and by the 16th century `thou' was all
but non-existent in upper-class speech, except in addressing obvious
inferiors. Naturally, this usage began
to be copied by the middle class, and by the 16th century `thou' was likewise rare
in middle-class speech, except in addressing obvious inferiors. But `thou' lingered long among working-class
people, especially in rural areas, and it still survives today in parts of the
north of England, where it has reportedly become something of a badge of
solidarity.
None of this requires any particular
explanation, but one point does: why did the non-reciprocal use of `you' and
`thou' in power-based relationships disappear?
Now, as Brown and Gilman argue in their famous paper, there has been a
steady trend (now mostly gone to completion) in European languages to replace
the older non-reciprocal power-based use of T and V pronouns with a newer
reciprocal
solidarity-based use. Something similar
appears to have happened much earlier in English, with the added twist that
`thou' was driven out of the standard language altogether. Nobody knows why, but Leith has an
interesting suggestion. He proposes
that 16th-century England, in comparison with most other European countries,
was characterized by a fluid and prosperous middle class, in which rapid rise
was possible by entrepreneurial success.
England, he argues, therefore lacked the comparatively rigid social
structures typical
ofother
countries, at least as far as the middle class was concerned. Whereas every
speaker of French or Spanish knew his own station and knew that of everyone
else, so that power-based non-reciprocal usage could be readily maintained, a
middle-class English person was by comparison insecure: he could never quite be
sure whether a stranger was an inferior, an equal, or a superior. Therefore, Leith concludes, the reciprocal
use of `you' rapidly took hold among the middle class as the safest option, as
a safe way of avoiding giving offense to a person one might need to do business
with or ask favors of.
(Mike Earl
Darnell -- see also below -- offers the same explanation. (AF))
Larry
Trask continues:
As for the Quakers, Leith tacks on an
afterthought. At the time when
Quakerism arose, `thou' was still frequent in working-class speech, and he
thinks the Quakers adopted it as a mark of humility. Fine, but he goes on to
suggest that the lack of respectability of the Quakers in their early days
combined with the general working-class status of `thou' to make this last
pronoun increasingly unacceptable to
respectable middle-class speakers, thus hastening its demise. But I personally see no justification at all
for invoking the Quakers: it seems clear that `thou' was already on the way out
of standard English by that time, so why drag in extraneous excuses? Does it really make
sense
to suppose that `you' spread into working-class speech because working-class
people objected to the Quakers?
Michael
Earl Darnell (darnell@csd.uwm.edu):
As to
the argument that the Quakers led to the disuse of the T form, I offer this
quotation from the article. I reproduce
so much here because these lines also point out the pejorative quality 'thou'
seemed to have taken on.
"Numerous episodes involving the
insulting sense of 'thou' appear in drama and in historical anecdotes. Perhaps the best known is from shakespeare's
'Twelfth Night', when Sir Tody goads Sir Andrew into a duel telling him that
when he meets his opponent 'if thou thou'st him some thrice, it shall not be
amiss"(3.2.50-51). In the trial of
Sir Walter Raliegh in 1603, the prosecutor sought to insult Raliegh with,
"I thou thee thou traitor!"
From a play around 1638, a master berates an apprentice "How dare
you thou a gentleman. **
Quakers
were physically abused when, for religious reasons they insisted on thouing
everyone" The last sentence is slightly misquote above, it actually begins
"In the middle of the seventeenth century, Quakers were. . ." the
article " 'O! When Degree is
Shak'd' Sixteenth-Century anticipations of Some Modern Attitudes Toward
Usage" Joseph M. Williams p.69-101 In 'English in its Social Contexts:
Essays in Historical Socio-Linguistics.
edited by Tim William Machan and Charles T. Scott Oxford U Press, 1992
Charles
Scott (CSCOTT@macc.wisc.edu) offered the same reference, and the following
comment: The business about the Quakers bears a relationship, I think, but not
in the way you describe. George Fox was
passionately concerned to maintain the NUMBER distinction between the 2nd
person pronouns thou and ye. But the
Quakers seemed to have been the ones to initiate leveling of the paradigm by
extending the objective case thee form into the subjective case, thus
eliminating thou, e.g. Thee must not do that.
Ironically, the same leveling took place in the plural paradigm when
objective case you replaced
subjective
case ye. That seems to have been the
Quaker contribution to the 2nd person personal pronoun development.
Christopher
Bobbitt (bobbittc@indiana.edu, member of Bloomington Meeting, Religious Society
of Friends) suggests two books, both by Richard Bauman [Professor of folklore
at Indiana University -Bloomington]:
_Christ
respects no man's person: the plain language of the early Quakers and the
rhetoric of impoliteness_. Austin,
Texas: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, 1981. [Working papers in
sociolinguistics, no. 88]
_Let
your words be few: symbolism of speaking and silence among seventeenth century
Quakers_. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. [Cambridge Studies in
Oral and Literate Culture, no. 8]
Thanks
also to:
Karl
Reinhardt (KReinhardt@UH.EDU)
Glenn
Bingham (BINGHAM@elan.rowan.edu)
Stuart
Luppescu (sl70@musuko.spc.uchicago.edu)
Anton
Sherwood (dasher@netcom.com)
Peter
Lasersohn (lasersoh@ling.ling.rochester.edu)
Thank
thee all for enlightening me (and, I trust, others) on this most fascinating
topic.
Alan
Firth
Aalborg
University, Denmark
----------------------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST
List: Vol-7-599.
Hello,
Hal:
This
went quicker than I thought. In the following list, each line shows the
total
number of words, number of 'you'
occurrences, number of 'thou'
occurrences,
and the name of the book. Let me know if this helps.
Bill
Williams
--- Original Message -----
From:
"Hal Schiffman" <haroldfs@ccat.sas.upenn.edu>
To:
<willprog@mediaone.net>; <haroldfs@ccat.sas.upenn.edu>
Sent:
Tuesday, March 06, 2001 2:50 PM
Subject:
use of pronouns
Dear
Professor Williams,
I am
emailing you with a question because I had hoped that your concordance page
would help me, but I see that the words I want to check are in the list of
exclusions. I am looking for a concordance of late ME and/or Early Modern
English that would show the declining use of the 'thou' pronoun and rising use
of the
'you' pronoun. I am trying to show that this occurred before the
mid-1600's
in order to rebut a claim made by a researcher who says that
Quaker
usage of 'thou' set up a situation where other speakers then began to avoid it.
I am a
linguist, but not an expert on English; I do remember many years ago citing
examples from early Shakespeare, where there were more usages of the 'thou'
pronoun as contrasted with later plays etc. with more 'you' usage.
Can you
refer me to a proper source on this?
Thanks
much,
Harold
Schiffman
U. of
Pennsylvania
A quick
look at the OED will tell you the earliest use of you in the singular; just
when thou died out is more difficult.
Not only the Quakers but others have continued to use it in special
instances. The best you can do then is
note when you could be used where Old or Middle English would have demanded
thou.
Of the
9 forms for 'you' in Old English (thu, the, thin; git, inc, incer; ge, eow,
eower) only the last two; the dative/accusative and genitive plurals surivive
in most modern English. The process of
loss began in Middle English with the loss of the dual, so attributing it to
Quakers seems unwise. Indeed, if the
pronoun were actually functioning at the time the Quakers insisted on the
'democratic' singular (Wm. Penn spent some time in prison for thou-ing English
judges), then they would have used thee and thou correctly. As you have noted, thee is the most common
form. During WWII my mother living then
in Pittsburgh recalls a young Quaker doing alternative service asking her
"Wilt thee fill ..." Melville makes fun of the incorrect use of thee
and thou in Moby Dick. His Bildad and
Peleg intersperse Thou with your and ye with thy "Thou Bildad!"
roared Peleg starting up and clattering about the cabin. "Blast ye, Captain Bildad..." (ch.
16). Surely if thee and thou were part
of the living language, such mixtures would not have occurred. The passage in Romeo and Juliet where
Mercutio and Tybalt squabble (Act III.i) When Tybalt comes upon the Montagues,
he addresses them as a group as you [Gentlemen, good-den -- a word with one of
you]; he continues to call Mercutio you [You shall find me apt enough to that,
sir, an you will give me occasion.]
Mercutio
in insulting him addresses him as you Could you not take some occasion without
giving?]; mortally insulted, Tybalt becomes angry and shifts to the familiar
thou [Mercutio thou consort'st with Romeo] at which level the squablle between
Romeo and Tybalt continues; when Mercutio interjects himself into the fray, he
again addresses Tybalt as you [Tybalt, you ratcatcher...] Behind the shifting usage are a number of
principles. Thou is opposed to you on several levels. Thou is singular; you is plural (a relic of Old English usage);
thou is familiar and you can be singular honorific [of age or social
status](a reflection of French
influence, first appearing in the 14th cen. according to the OED) and you has
become a general address by the lower classes.
Tybalt begins with you addressing a group; he continues formally by
addressing Mercutio as you, since he wants something from him, namely
information about Romeo's whereabouts.
Mercutio responds by insulting Tybalt (some say by suggesting homosexual
interest on his part), but being lower class, continues his accustomed you to
Tybalt his social superior. Angered
Tybalt resorts to thou the form for social underlings and by the verb consort
throws Mercutio's suggestion back in his face.
Mercutio, angered, now thous Tybalt, bringing him down to his level.
[The verb thou is indeed recorded in just this sense to insult someone; the OED
cites from the 16th cen. "I thou thee, thou traitor!"] Benvolio jumps in and addresses two of them,
politely and plurally as you; Tybalt responds to this civility with a formal
you addressed to Benvolio. Mercutio
then returns to habitual polite you forms but continues taunting Tybalt, who
turns his attention to the arriving Romeo, whom he addresses as thou. Romeo deliberately interprets the use as
familiar and insists that he loves Tybalt.
Whether
one accepts my explanation of the shifting usage in each case, this passage
shows that the use of thee and you in the 16th century was both varied and
complex. Pyles/Algeo (Origins and
Development of the English Language 190-91) note the same factors but claim
that by the 16th cen. There is 'frequently no apparent reason for their
interchange' though in the workbook, they ask students to sort out factors
justifying the pronouns. Baugh/Cable (History of the English Language 237)
makes essentially the same claim that thou had ceased to have any real distinction
in the late 16th century. Even before
Shakespeare, Skelton (died 1529) could write:
"Brother be of good cheer,/ abash you not ..." using you for
the singular in a context where no social superiority or greater age can be
invoked. Thus, the expansion of you as
a general singular can be dated to around 1500. Marvel (d. 1678) can address
his Coy Mistress Thou by the Indian Ganges side ... And you should if you
please refuse ... in the same poem, proof the by the end of the 17th cen. you
had become both singular and plural.
From
lass@iafrica.com Fri Jun 22 04:25:34
2001
I hate
to blow my own trumpet (no actually I don't) but one very useful source is my
discussion in The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. III,
1476-1776 (CUP, 2000). The second half of my chapter ('Phonology and
morphology') has a long discussion, with reference to letters and address,
citation of early sources, and literature references. Most of the important
material is cited there. The Quakers are an urban legend in this matter by the
way. By Elizabethan times there was already a preference for 'you', and 'thou'
was reserved pretty much for affection/intimacy and contempt. In the transcript
of the trial of Sir Walter Raleigh there's an interesting passage where after a
long
period of respectful 'you', the prosecutor gets angry and says 'Thou viper,
thou liest'.
From
andersen@humnet.ucla.edu Fri Jun 22
04:38:46 2001
Return-Path:
<andersen@humnet.ucla.edu>
Most
recent work on this topic is probably referred to in Ulrich Busse, 'Markedness
and the use of address pronouns in Early Modern English', to appear in
'Actualization: Linguistic Change in Progress', which I have just edited,
published by Benjamins, Amsterdam.
You
might write Busse for a copy: ubusse@uos.de
Best,
H
From
markjjones@hotmail.com Fri Jun 22
06:04:16 2001
Dear
Hal,
I can
tell you that 'thou' and 'thy' (both usually 'tha' or 'ta') as well as 'thee'
are alive and well in northern England. People in Chesterfield call
Sheffielders 'dee-da's' because of their usage of 'thee' and 'tha' (often
becoming 'dee' and 'da'), and members of my own family use it all the time: a
maternal cousin recently said (to his mother) "Wey [well] i look after
thee when tha't [thou art] badly [ill]". Prof Katie Wales at Leeds has
done research on this - See Wales, Katie. (1996) Personal pronouns in
present-day English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 xvii, 234p;
24cm. It
may
contain the answers you're looking for.
all the
best
Mark
Mark J.
Jones
Department
of Linguistics and Trinity College
University
of Cambridge
mjj13@hermes.cam.ac.uk
_________________________________________________________________
From
mfatssa2@fs1.art.man.ac.uk Fri Jun 22
08:30:02 2001
Dear
Professor Schiffman,
Dr
Debra Ziegeler has passed your query on to me. You are certainly right to think
that the decline of THOU predates the rise of Quakerism, or, rather, that THOU
was already a marked form by 1600. There is a very extensive literature on this
point, which I can only assume that Silverstein is ignorant of. For a recent (abbreviated) account, with references to the major contemporary
scholarship in the field, see Roger Lass's chapter on morphology in volume 3 of
the Cambridge History of the Englsih Language, ed. Lass (CUP, 1999) For my own
'beginner's guide' see the section on THOU in my chapter on Shakespeare's
grammar in Arden's 'Reading Shakespeare's Dramatic Language' (Arden
Shakespeare, 2001). On the other hand, I do
think there are points to be made about the effect of Puritan ideology
on certain aspects of English. I've argued some of them in my paper 'From
empathetic deixis to empathetic narrative' in TPhS 92.1:55-88 (1994), reprinted in 1995 in Subjectivity and
Subjectivisation ed. Stein & Wright, CUP.
best
wishes, Sylvia Adamson
Professor
Sylvia Adamson,
Dept of
English & American Studies
Hi.
Sorry,
I scribbled that about the Quakers unclearly. What I meant is that they had no
particular part in the you/thou story in other varieties of English, though
they did often do something very interesting and connected to the story of
'you', i.e. use 'thee' as the nominative (do they still?). This is interesting
because the phenomenon occurs elsewhere in English ('you' is an original dative
plural), and in some other Germanic languages, e.g. Austro-Bavarian and Yiddish
'mir' (dat 1 sg) for 'wir' (nom 1 pl). Afrikaans has also taken oblique 'ons'
(dat and acc pl) and used it for nom pl. And many dialects of northern English
use 'us' [Uz] for genitive.
By the
way I ought to add that thou vs. you is still alive and well even in
working-class children's speech in some parts of the North Midlands (e.g.
Sheffield), where thou is familiar and you is formal. Also in slightly more
old-fashioned dialects in NE Yorkshire. I had an MA student from that area
(she'd now be about 40) who once in a fit of anger said to me what could best
be represented as 'Fook thee, tha daft booger'. Both nom and oblique distinct.
And when we visited her at home with her parents, I noticed that they referred
to her with thou and us with you (ee, Jan, willt tha go in kitchen and fetch
tea).
RL
-----Original
Message-----
From:
Harold F. Schiffman <haroldfs@ccat.sas.upenn.edu>
To:
Roger Lass <lass@iafrica.com>
Date:
22 June 2001 05:05
Subject:
Re: English historical ling
I am
not an expert in the history of English, but I am a student of it. I am a
senior in Linguistics. I know that the use of thou and its various forms began
to decline during Shakespeare's time and that it was practically gone by 1800.
I know that this decline began with a change in usage similar to the current
Quaker usage. That's about all I know on the subject, but I can refer you to an
expert in the field. Dr. Don Chapman of the Department of English at Brigham
Young University in Provo, Utah has his doctorate in Medieval Studies and is an
expert in Old English. He is extremely knowledgeable in the history of English
and can probably answer all of your questions. His email is don_chapman@byu.edu
Good luck in your search! ~Jared Grigg
PS In
case I didn't make it clear earlier, I think you should be able to find strong
evidence to refute Silverstein's claim.