Odd thing about personal pronouns:

In the first person there are four different prounouns:
. . .Subject: I see Joe (plural: We see.)
. . .Object: Joe sees me (and sees us).
The third person also has has four different prounouns (plus some extras for gender):
. . .Subject: He sees Joe. (plural: They see Joe.)
. . .Object: Joe sees him (and sees them).
But in the second person, one prounoun fits all:
. . .Subject: You see Joe. (plural: You two see Joe.)
. . .Object: Joe sees you (and sees you two).

How did this happen? Were there originally four different you's, that collapsed into one? Or did the other pronouns originally have a single form, and then multiply?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: shufitz,

Originally, there was also thee/thou as the singular version. Ye was used as the nominative plural. However, in the transition between Middle English to Modern English these words fell out of use, apart from in some dialects.

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In Texas, and around the South, they use "Y'all" as the second person plural. Unfortunately, it is done terribly. For instance, the second person plural possessive is not "yours", it is "y'alls", which disturbs me to tend end. There are many other instances where even accepting the use of y'all as correct, it is used incorrectly.

The technical term for this is suppletion. This means that different forms of a word in a paradigm are actually from different roots: e.g., good / better, I / me, go / went, etc. Pronominal suppletion goes back to Proto-Indo-European. In Old English, the paradigm for personal pronouns in the nominative and accusative forms looked like this:

1PS: ic, me
2PS: þu, þe
3PSm: he, hine
3PSf: heo, hí(e)
3PSn: hit, hit
1PD: wit, unc
2PD: git, inc
3PD: n/a
1PPl: we, ús
2PPl: ge, éow
3PPlm: híe, híe
3PPlf: hí, hí

Legend: 1 = first, 2 = second, 3 = third, P = person, S = singular, D = dual, Pl = plural, m = masculine, f = feminine, n = neuter. Bold items indicates suppletion. Acute accent indicates vocalic lengthening.

Some of the demonstrative pronouns in OE were also suppletive:

3PSm: se, þone 'the, that'
3PSf: séo, þá

(This paradigm eventual became the definite article the in Present-Day English.)

z, what do you mean by 'paradigm' in this context?

More important, if "pronominal suppletion goes back to Proto-Indo-European," then other modern IE languages should similarly have such varied-root of the pronouns, correct? Do they in fact have them?

Also, by what process did the 2nd person "collapse" into a single form, with 'you' taking all the roles? (Is there a technical term for that sort of collapse?) Why did that happen only in the 2nd person? Have other languages had similar pronoun-collapses?

A paradigm, in its linguistic sense, is a list of word forms: e.g., a nominal paradigm is usually called a declension and a verbal paradigm is usually called a conjugation. It's those lists of word forms you find in dusty old grammars of classical or other ancient languages. (It is, I believe, the original use of the word paradigm, which was later extended by de Saussure, and picked up the the structuralists, and made famous by Thomas Kuhn. Oh, and the pedantic plural of paradigm is paradigmata.)

For 1PS, there's:

Latin: ego, mē(d)
Sanskrit: aham, mā
Gothic: ik, mik
Old Church Slavonic: azŭ, mę
Lithuanian: aš, manę

About collapsing multiple forms into a single one, you see that sort of thing when going from Latin, a highly inflected language, to the various Romance languages, which are less inflected. So, Latin's five cases get reduced to one, or maybe two in the pronouns. I think it's usually called leveling which nay or may not be due to grammaticalization. You see it taking place in English in non-standard dialects: with good and gooder, instead of good and better.

As for the process whereby thou / ye were replaced by you / you, it was historical and sociological: thou, in Shakespeare's time, seemed to go from intimate use to use between persons of superior and inferior status. As in other European languages, the plural for you, seems to replace the singular form in formal situations. Thus German Du 'thou' and Ihr 'ye' (informal) vs Sie 'you, sg & pl., formal). In German, Sie comes from the word for they being used for a formal you.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: zmježd,

Strictly speaking, there is still a clear number distinction between singular you and plural you, manifested not in the subject or object forms but in reflexive agreement: You saw yourself. You saw yourselves.

Merger of singular and plural you is common enough in European languages, though most of them retain an intimate thou. (In fact, English is the only one I can think of that has no thou at all.) It's also common enough for languages to then develop new plurals of you: Spanish vosotros, Basque zuek from zu, which is now strictly a singular form despite plural verb agreement, and English yous, yall in some dialects.

I don't know why subject ye and object you fell together however. They didn't become phonetically so close as to be indistinguishable, a common cause of fusion. The only other English personal pronoun not to maintain the distinction is it, but no neuter in any Indo-European language has ever had a distinction between nominative and accusative.

quote:

I don't know why subject ye and object you fell together however.

Can't say for sure either, but perhaps both ye and you in certain constructions had their vowels reduced to schwa. (Cf. the dialect spelling of you as ya: "ya goin' t'town?", "how are ya?", "what ya doin?" /w@tS@ duWn/.)

Interestingly, in an NPR report I heard that during the recent French riots there has been a change in their use of "you." They had been using the informal word for "you" when talking about the people rioting. However, in order to show more respect, they are not using the formal "you."

Think about it. One word is in the middle of a very tenuous political situation.