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Ye (pronoun)
Archaic second-person pronoun in English From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Ye (/jiː/ ⓘ, unstressed /jɪ/ or /jə/[1]) is a second-person, plural, personal pronoun (nominative), 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. While its use is archaic in most of the English-speaking world, it is used in Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada and in some parts of Ireland, to distinguish from the singular "you".[2] It is also a typical singular and plural form of you in Scots.
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In southeastern England, ye had disappeared by c. 1600 in regular speech, being replaced by the original oblique case form you.[3]
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Etymology
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In Old English, the use of second-person pronouns was governed by a simple rule: þū addressed one person, ġit addressed two people, and ġē addressed more than two. After the Norman Conquest, which marks the beginning of the French vocabulary influence that characterised the Middle English period, the singular was gradually replaced by the plural as the form of address for a superior and later for an equal. The practice of matching singular and plural forms with informal and formal connotations, respectively, is called the T–V distinction, and in English it is largely due to the influence of French. This began with the practice of addressing kings and other aristocrats in the plural. Eventually, this was generalised, as in French, to address any social superior or stranger with a plural pronoun, which was believed to be more polite. In French, tu was eventually considered either intimate or condescending (and, to a stranger, potentially insulting), while the plural form vous was reserved and formal.
Following the French-language conventions, the word þū evolved into thou and became the informal second-person singular pronoun. In Early Modern English, ye functioned as both an informal plural and formal singular second-person nominative pronoun. "Ye" is still commonly used as an informal plural in Hiberno‐English and Newfoundland English. Both dialects also use variants of "ye" for alternative cases, such as "yeer" (your), "yeers" (yours), and "yeerselves" (yourselves).[4]
The pronoun is also sometimes used as a literary device, as in poetry, e.g. "Ye are many—they are few!" (Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy, 1819).
- The genitives my, mine, thy, and thine are used as possessive adjectives before a noun, or as possessive pronouns without a noun. All four forms are used as possessive adjectives: mine and thine are used before nouns beginning in a vowel sound, or before nouns beginning in the letter h, which was usually silent (e.g. thine eyes and mine heart, which was pronounced as mine art) and my and thy before consonants (thy mother, my love). However, only mine and thine are used as possessive pronouns, as in it is thine and they were mine (not *they were my).
- From the early Early Modern English period up until the 17th century, his was the possessive of the third-person neuter it as well as of the third-person masculine he. Genitive it appears once in the 1611 King James Bible (Leviticus 25:5) as groweth of it owne accord.
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Confusion with the definite article ye
Ye is also a definite article, a typographic variant of the Early Modern English the. This is often seen in pseudo-Early Modern English phrases such as Ye Olde.
See also
Look up ye in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
References
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