Re: Engish 2sg/pl

On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 10:07:09AM +0700, Daniel Ryan Prohaska wrote:
> In my dialect, or I should rather say my grandad's, bacause my
> generation doesn't use it anymore, the distinction was still in
> place. In his Lancashire dialect he used to say "tha" for the
> familiar singular and "ya"/"you" for the plural, and when speaking
> "proper". One still hears older people using phrases such as
> "tha knows it, dussen't?", "where 'asta bin" and the like.
Wow.  It's amazing that remnants of "thou" were still around only
two generations ago.  It's completely gone in the US, but then, it
was already pretty much completely gone from most of England when the
US was settled.

Certain isolated religious communities, such as the Amish and
Mennenites, do still use a form of it.  Oddly, though, they seem
to use "thee" as both subject and object, with the "you" form of
the verb ("Thee are late.  Where have thee been?"), which sounds
very wrong to me.

When I was taking Spanish in a high school in Middle Georgia,
my instructor remarked upon how much easier it was to render
certain Spanish concepts into Southern than into standard English.
Besides having "y'all" for 2nd person plural, we also have the
three locatives "here", "there", and "yonder".  Personally, when
I translated into English from Spanish,  I used "thou/thee" for
singular and "y'all" for plural, just so the reader could tell
immediately from the English whether it was singular or plural -
even if it sounded a little weird. :)

-Mark

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