Re: Methods of Question-Forming

Jake X scripsit:

> OK, I give in.  But I'm curious now.  When did thou and you switch places
> in formality?  Logically, thou should be the more intimate one.
Historically, it was, and it was used in addressing not only friends and
family but also God, the Ultimate Intimate, and so used in the King James
and Douay Versions.  In "Our Father, who/which art in heaven", the "art"
shows the intimate form is implicit.  When all other uses were lost,
these texts remained important, and so "thou" came to be thought of as
a version of "you" for occasions of ceremony.

"Thou" lasted a bit longer as a pronoun of contempt than of intimacy,
and we can find all three uses (ceremony, contempt, intimacy) in
_The Lord of the Rings_, as Tolkien himself remarks in Appendix F.
See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/elfling/message/13942 for a hopefully
complete catalog of 2nd person familiar in LotR with my exegesis.

--
John Cowan           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all.  There
are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language
that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful.
        --_The Hobbit_

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