Ye (pronoun)

"Ye" (: IPA|/jiː/ or, traditionally IPA|/ðiː/) was the
second-person, plural, personal pronoun (Nominative) in Old English as "ge". In Middle English and Early Modern English it was also used to direct an equal or superior person. It is also common today in Ireland's Hiberno-English to distinguish from the singular "you".

The use of the term "Ye" to represent a pseudo-Early Modern English form of the word "the" is, in fact, incorrect. This mistaken attribution is due to the medieval usage of the letter thorn (þ) the predecessor to the modern digraph "th". Thorn (þ) is a letter which is today only in common use in Icelandic. The word "The" was thus written "Þe". Medieval printing presses didn't contain the letter "thorn", so the y was substituted due to its similarity in some medieval scripts, especially later ones.

Etymology

In Old English, "ye" was governed by a fairly simple rule: "thou" addressed one person, and "ye" more than one. After the Norman Conquest, which marks the beginning of the French vocabulary influence that characterized the Middle English period, "thou" was gradually replaced by the plural "ye" 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 is called the T-V distinction, and in English 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 generalized, as in French, to address any social superior or stranger with a plural pronoun, which was felt 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. In Early Modern English, "ye" functioned as both an informal plural and formal singular second-person nominative pronoun.Fact|date=November 2007

References

See also

* Y'all