The Pronoun of Direct Address in Seventeenth-Century English

Abstract

IN LATIN THE EMPEROR, representing in his person the power and glory of his predecessors, was addressed with vos in the fourth century A.D. By the fifth century, this pronoun was commonly employed to indicate respect. In French by the time of Chritien de Troyes, vous was not only given to superiors but was also interchanged by equals. In Latin and French works of twelfth-century England, the plural pronoun had been used as a singular by, for example, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, and Marie de France. The practice of using ye and you (the you-singular)1 instead of thou and thee (the thou-singular) apparently spread to English during the thirteenth century2 and by about 600oo had become established in polite usage. For some time thereafter, however, the thou-singular continued to appear in emotional or intimate speech and in the discourse of superiors to inferiors and of the members of the lower class to one another.3 Gradually decreasing in use, it became obsolete in the standard language in the eighteenth century4 and now appears only in poetry and the address of the deity or among Quakers and those who speak a dialect. Early students of English, writing in the tradition of Latin grammar, usually ignored the dual usage of their time in their paradigms and in their definitions of the pronouns of address. The you-singular, apparently, was not formally recognized before the second half of the seventeenth century. I have found it regis-