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You comes from the Proto-Germanic demonstrative base *juz-, *iwwiz from Proto-Indo-European * yu-(second-person plural pronoun). [1] Old English had singular, dual, and plural second-person pronouns. The dual form was lost by the twelfth century, [ 2 ] : 117 and the singular form was lost by the early 1600s. [ 3 ]
In linguistics, grammatical person is the grammatical distinction between deictic references to participant(s) in an event; typically, the distinction is between the speaker (first person), the addressee (second person), and others (third person).
The pronoun "Ye" used in a quote from the Baháʼu'lláh. Ye / j iː / ⓘ is a second-person, plural, personal pronoun (), spelled in Old English as "ge".In Middle English and Early Modern English, it was used as a both informal second-person plural and formal honorific, to address a group of equals or superiors or a single superior.
The English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and grammatical gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and ...
In the 18th century, Samuel Johnson, in A Grammar of the English Tongue, wrote: "in the language of ceremony ... the second person plural is used for the second person singular", implying that thou was still in everyday familiar use for the second-person singular, while you could be used for the same grammatical person, but only for formal ...
Y'all is a contraction of you all.The spelling you-all in second-person plural pronoun usage was first recorded in 1824. [4] [5] The earliest two attestations with the actual spelling y'all are from 1856, [6] and in the Southern Literary Messenger (published in Richmond, Virginia) in 1858. [7]
The re-use in some languages of one personal pronoun to indicate a second personal pronoun with formality or social distance – commonly a second person plural to signify second person singular formal – is known as the T–V distinction, from the Latin pronouns tu and vos.
An archaic set of second-person pronouns used for singular reference is thou, thee, thyself, thy, thine, which are still used in religious services and can be seen in older works, such as Shakespeare's—in such texts, ye and the you set of pronouns are used for plural reference, or with singular reference as a formal V-form. [7]