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A comment on Did English ever have a formal version of "you"? (2011).

Re:Did English ever have a formal version of "you"? (2011) by kawa on Sunday December 24, 2023 @02:38PM (#38756087)
"Thou" sounds very similar to german "du" which is the current informal form. In older german the second person plural ('Ihr', similar to "vous" french from which "you" may come) was also the formal form, but it's out of fashion for a few centuries now.
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Re:Did English ever have a formal version of "you"? (2011) by LAC-Tech on Sunday December 24, 2023 @03:41PM (#38756633)
Indeed, it's the same word! In the ancestor language of both English and German (and also Dutch, Low German, and many others) it's been reconstructed as "þū".
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Re:Did English ever have a formal version of "you"? (2011) by amelius on Sunday December 24, 2023 @07:03PM (#38758271)
What is the ancestor language, and how do you pronounce þū?
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Re:Did English ever have a formal version of "you"? (2011) by pvg on Sunday December 24, 2023 @09:34PM (#38759128)
proto-West Germanic by current thinking (at least, by Wikipedia)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Germanic_languages#Validi...

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