USAGE English 'thou' (was: Proto-Romance)

On Tuesday, March 23, 2004, at 07:56 PM, Joe wrote:

> Christophe Grandsire wrote:
[snip]
>> people just like people speaking a foreign language! And the
>> differences between dialects can be lexical, syntactic and
>> morphological (for example my friend's dialect still uses "gij" for
>> "jij": "you (sg)" (in other dialects, "gij" is like "thou" in English:
>> it's limited to talking to God).
>
>
> Of course, 'thou' still exists in English(as 'tha') in the North.
Yep - where it's used like French 'tu' (and Welsh 'ti'). I understand from
And, who is more familiar with that part of England than I am, it is still
alive in the colloquial speech of the young in northern England.

But in fact in modern English of the 21st cent, God is more often
addressed as "you" IME - certainly by Catholics and AFAIK main-stream
Protestants. The older forms, 'thou', 'thee' etc are retained only in
traditional prayers like the "Our father" and the "Hail Mary". I believe,
however, conservative Protestants still use 'thou' and I guess that "at
the other end of the spectrum" Sedevacantists would also used 'thou' on
the occasions when they address God in English rather than Latin.

Ray
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