Proper usage of “Thee”s and “Thou”s.
On Friday I mentioned my preference for the archaic second-person pronouns. Today I thought I’d explain them for the under-initiated.
Pronouns consider person, plurality, and part of speech. An example of part of speech is “he had his hopes for him”; rather than label each of the “he”, “his”, and “him” I’m not confident I know the correct labels myself… my knowledge is a practical (and limited) rather than theoretical. I’ll simply use this example sentence for every case. The verb also changes to match person and plurality, as well as tense.
We have present-tense singular:
| I | have | my | hopes for | me |
| thou | hast | thy | hopes for | thee |
| it | hath | its | hopes for | it |
| she | hath | her | hopes for | her |
| he | hath | his | hopes for | him |
Present-tense plural:
| we | have | our | hopes for | us |
| ye | have | your | hopes for | you |
| they | have | their | hopes for | them |
Past-tense singular:
| I | had | my | hopes for | me |
| thou | hadst | thy | hopes for | thee |
| it | had | its | hopes for | it |
And past-tense plural:
| we | had | our | hopes for | us |
| ye | had | your | hopes for | you |
| they | had | their | hopes for | them |
For the most part, the other tenses (future, progressive, participles, etc.) are still used correctly today.
As for verbs other than “have”, I frankly don’t know consciously what exceptions or rules there may be. It seems from surveying a random set of verbs in my head that the for the general case you add “t”, “st”, or “est” to the end of verbs used with second-person subjects: “thou runest”, though I’m not always clear on details (past tense second for “run”: is it “ranest”, “ran”, other?).
That is the problem with archaic usage. Limited exposure means it is hard to know the corner cases.
Looking for comments…