Pronouns: What are “Thou” and “Ye”?

If you’ve ever read Shakespeare—or other older English literature—you’ve no doubt seen some unfamiliar words. Some of those words—such as ye, thou, and thee—mean you. You may also have seen some unfamiliar verb forms related to these words. What are they, and what is the grammar behind them? If you learn this, you’ll be ahead even of most native English speakers.

Modern Personal Pronouns

When you first started learning English, you learned the personal pronouns, words like I, you, and it. These pronouns don’t quite follow the normal patterns of English—their grammar is actually left over from Old English. You might have memorized a chart like this:

Hopefully you recognize the forms in the chart, even if you never actually learned such a chart. You should notice several things:

1. Each entry has four forms. For example, the forms of the 1st person singular are: I, me, my, and mine.
2. Each form is different.
3. The singular and plural forms are different.
4. There’s a problem with the 2nd person: The singular and plural forms are the same!

That last point is a problem for native English speakers, since in other cases, we almost always have to distinguish between singular and plural. Various ways to solve this exist. See the article on y’all for one solution. However, this problem didn’t exist 400 years ago.

The Way it Was

Back in the day, English had some more personal pronouns and some extra verb endings to go with them. This chart shows how things used to be, and the differences are highlighted.

Let’s look at a few details.

Words

Notice that there are separate 2nd person pronouns. The singular form was thee and thou (plus possessives), while the plural form was ye and you (plus possessives). This made the singular/plural distinction clear. It’s too bad that all we have left today is you.

Grammar

The second person also had different verb forms in the present tense and sometimes the past tense. The 2nd person singular regular verbs ended in -st or -est, while singular are became art. The plural forms were the same as today.

The other grammar difference was more straightforward: The -s/-es of the third person singular was -th/-eth, and has was instead hath.

What Happened?

Four hundred years ago, English was rather inconsistent. The grammar and vocabulary I presented above describe the ideal situation. However, people didn’t always follow the rules as given, and there was also variation based on where people were from. Because of this inconsistency, native speakers over time forgot many of the rules and English grammar simplified. For the most part, this was a useful change, but I wish we still had thou and ye.

Are there any other old forms of English you want to know about? Leave a comment below!

Footnote