Start Using ‘thou’

Posted by Timothy Williams  •  Stories

Start Using ‘thou’

Over the course of its existence, the number of speakers of English and the number of words they use have grown exponentially. In terms of grammar and syntax, however, English has generally become a simpler, more user-friendly language.

Whereas nouns in Old English could be declined into one of six cases (as in Latin or German), today this practice is preserved only in a handful of pronouns.

Although there are a lot of reasons why simplicity is a virtue when it comes to language, it does raise the question whether any of those old quirks were actually more useful than we tend to assume. Here are just three reasons the answer might just be, well, yea. – Oxford Blog

[ reference article below ]

Not a bad idea to start using “thou”, “thee”, “yea” and “nay”.

A man of knowledge uses words with restraint, … (Proverbs 17:27)

While I preached, uh, use to preach until ran out of the Town of Enumclaw Washington, I used common usage English – however, nothing compares to the beauty, the exactness and the loveliness of the King James Bible.

Bonus Wisdom:

 So just as yea was the general term for affirming or assenting, nay was used if you were contradicting a positively formed statement or question like Is a heretic fit to translate holy scripture into English?, while no was only used in answer to negative questions like It’s not still raining, is it? or Isn’t he wonderful? The distinction might seem confusing at first but, properly applied, it removes all possibility of waiters and customers misunderstanding each other. – Oxford Blog

teaching you true and reliable words, so that you can give sound answers to him who sent you? (Proverbs 22:21)

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enumclaw.com ~ opinion unto righteousness ~ timothy williams
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Sunday, February 4, 2018
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Article Reference

(blog.oxforddictionaries.com)—Thou
Because we generally hear this word when we’re studying Shakespeare in school, most modern speakers of English tend to get the idea that thou was a very serious formal way to address another person, when in fact it was just the opposite. For most of English history, if you wanted to address someone respectfully, the word you used was you. You was also the word you used to address more than one person, like vous in French or sie in German. Thou, by contrast, was the more intimate, friendly way of speaking to one other person.

Since its disappearance, English speakers have bemoaned the fact that we don’t have a standard way of indicating whether we are speaking to one individual or a whole group. Of course, if we used thou instead of you when we were talking to one other person, then there really wouldn’t be this confusion. And it would spare us all the indignity of being called y’all, you guys, or youse.