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#9 --"You" goes as far back as English can be traced. Ye/you was the plural, with thou/thee the singular.

In Shakespeare they are used as tu and vous are used in French. It's worth paying attention to. No one says "you" to a servant or to someone he wishes to insult. (And of course no one says "thou" to a group.)

Thou/thee didn't become quite extinct until sometime in the 18th century. And the Quakers of course refused even later than that to call anyone "you" since it implied that all of God's children were not equal, going on saying "thee" until quite recently; Richard Nixon's Quaker mother said "thee".

As they might even today in some parts of Yorkshire (in England)..

As for my..
However... the only condition he was under was not to involve the Tudors in any political sense in his plays.

I am wondering whether even clever Shakespeare was able to actually flout the rules, and actually involve the Tudors in any political sense in his plays.

It depends on how you define "his". Henry VIII; Sir Thomas More.

#10

Interesting. Did the Quakers also use the -st conjugation in the present tense?

#`3 -- They did originally. By the 20th century, American Quakers were using thee with third person singular verbs.

In the title song to the movie Friendly Persuasion, Tony Perkins sings "thee is mine." I used to think that was ignorance, but it's the way 20th century US Quakers spoke. The movie is set during the Civil War -- Gary Cooper in an ethical dilemma -- but I don't know if the dialect is right for that period or if they were still saying "thou art mine." It's from a novel by Jessamyn West, who was a Quaker, and she probably got it right.

I want to make it clear that although I sometimes link to songs I think people should hear, the above link is for documentation purposes and does not constitute a recommendation.

Edited by: VinnyD who replaced Pat Boone with Tony Perkins but still doesn't recommend the song.