Ye (pronoun)

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Ye (IPA: /jiː/ or, traditionally /ðiː/) was the second-person, plural, personal pronoun (Nominative) in Old English as "ge". In Middle English and Early Modern English it also was used to direct a equal or superior person in addition. It is also common today in Ireland's Hiberno-English to distinguish from the singular "you".

The use of the term "Ye" to represent a pseudo-Early Modern English form of the word "the" is, in fact, incorrect. This mistaken attribution is due to the medieval usage of the letter thorn (þ) the predecessor to the modern digraph "th". Thorn (þ) is a letter which is today only in common use in Icelandic. The word "The" was thus written Þe. Medieval printing presses didn't contain the letter "thorn", so the y was substituted due to its similarity in some medieval scripts, especially later ones.

[edit] Etymology

In Old English, ye was governed by a fairly simple rule: thou addressed one person, and ye more than one. After the Norman Conquest, which marks the beginning of the French vocabulary influence that characterized the Middle English period, thou was gradually replaced by the plural ye as the form of address for a superior and later for an equal. The practice of matching singular and plural forms with informal and formal connotations is called the T-V distinction, and in English is largely due to the influence of French. This began with the practice of addressing kings and other aristocrats in the plural. Eventually, this was generalized, as in French, to address any social superior or stranger with a plural pronoun, which was felt to be more polite. In French, tu was eventually considered either intimate or condescending (and, to a stranger, potentially insulting), while the plural form vous was reserved and formal. By In Early Modern English, ye functioned as both an informal plural and formal singular second-person nominative pronoun.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] References

1. ^ ^{a b} In a deliberately archaic style, the possessive forms are used as the genitive before words beginning with a vowel sound (eg thine eyes) similar to how an is used instead of a in a similar situation. This practice is irregularly followed in the King James Bible, but is more regular in earlier literature, such as the Early Modern English texts of Geoffrey Chaucer. Otherwise, thy and thine correspond with my and mine; that is, the first is attributive (my/thy goods,) and the second predicative (they are mine/thine). Shakespear pokes fun at this custom when the character Bottom says "mine eyen" in A Midsummer Night's Dream
2. ^ ^{a b} From the early Early Modern English period up until the 17th century, his was the possessive of the third person neuter it as well as of the 3rd person masculine he. Later, the neologism its became common. "Its" appears only once in the 1611 King James Bible (Leviticus 25:5).