Thy thee thine thy thee thine thy thee thine

(With apologies to George Harrison.)

Two promos this time: N. E. Absolom’s Soliloquy and Tim Paulson’s Path of Ruin.

Check ‘em out!

I was reading a recent piece of fantasy, professionally published and the whole bit, and my teeth got right on edge. Every now and again, certain characters start in on the whole “thee, thou, thy” thing, and the author keeps getting it wrong. If you’re going to do it, do it right! It’s not hard.

First of all, thou is the second-person singular pronoun in subject position, like I and he/she/it. Thee is object, like me and him/her/it. Thy is possessive, like my and his/her/its. With one major exception, thine is reflexive, like mine and his/hers/its. The exception is that when thy comes before an open vowel, it’s replaced with thine to avoid a glottal-stop: thine eye, and properly speaking mine envelope.

Now in the plural, sometimes it’s you and sometimes it’s ye. So far as I can tell, it’s not entirely consistent here, and I’ve rarely seen ye used smoothly in the last century or so. I think you sort of have to sound it out: does it sound better with you/your or with ye?

Of course, pronouns do have an effect on verbs. I go but he goes, right?

Well, as a general rule the second-person singular takes the suffix -st, and the third-person singular the suffix -th. Some verbs are irregular, of course, as you’d expect, but that’s the general principle. 

If you’ve done much reading of premodern English, you’re pretty much all set with just these points. If in doubt, check the King James Bible, which is kind of the arbiter of all such forms.

Let’s try it, shall we?

I go

Thou goest / thou dost go

He goeth / he doth go

We go

You go

They go

Okay?

Have — hast — hath

Give — givest — giveth

Will — wilt — will (not willeth, unless you mean an act of will!)

Should — shouldst — should

The elf-king spake unto the assembled, saying, What would ye? Lord Erigon hath promised his aid.

Then spake Lord Arbitru: O mighty king, I plead that thou shouldst bestow upon mine ally Erigon thy blessing.

And the king bowed his head, and said, Thy plea hath pleased me, O cousin.

Then cried the multitude, Huzzay!

This really isn’t terribly difficult, when push comes to shove.

Incidentally, the whole will/shall thing turns out to be a relatively modern interpretation of Shakespearean and KJV usage. Some folks, especially those who went to a certain sort of English public school (which of course means a private school, because obviously), learned that will and shall have distinct meanings dependent on the person speaking—person here meaning the grammatical person.

In that understanding, “I will” means “I am definitely going to,” and “you shall” means “you are definitely going to.” Conversely, “I shall” means “I intend to” and “you will” means “you intend to.”

Thus:

—I will drown! 

—Then I shall not dive in to save you; you shall indeed drown.

Alternatively:

—I shall drown!

—Then I will dive in to save you, and you will not drown.

Some people get very shirty about this, and God bless ‘em for it. I’m always happy to stumble on people taking some grammatical or usage point seriously, even if it is a little forced. I’ve always been down on “hopefully,” for instance (“hopefully, the bus will arrive”—sounds silly to me), and I do try to avoid splitting infinitives.

What I find irritating about will/shall is the current claim, found in lots of online usage thingies, that “shall” is just more formal. To my eye, that’s like saying that thou/thy/thee is just more formal than you/your, and presumably in that case you/your is just more formal than y’all, y’all’s. Which is true, I suppose, but not in the sense meant.

While we’re on the subject, can I just say that I find the use of “may” in certain hypotheticals annoying? “It seemed like he may be thinking about murder.” No: it seems like he may be thinking about murder, or it seemed like he might be thinking about murder. Note agreement of tenses.

In the end, I think it’s a question of how you learned languages other than English. If you learned them through a pure usage model, maybe this kind of strict breakdown seems weird. As for me, my first non-English language was Latin, so it comes naturally to me to think in what are often called “paradigms.” A paradigm (in this case) is a kind of table of all the forms of a word or phrase, and you memorize it; if it’s not irregular, it’s a paradigm in the sense that it’s a model for how every phrase of the same type is formulated. Latin paradigms are pretty regular and uncomplicated; I am reliably informed that Sanskrit paradigms make classical Greek paradigms look like a weak joke. The point being that once you understand a paradigm, you look at a situation and think, “Okay, this is P person, T tense, M mood, V voice, and that means it has to go like the following.” You don’t just sort of wing it based on what your ear tells you.

And that’s what annoys me about the elf-lord saying, “Would thee poureth me a cup of tea? For I am fairly parchedest.”

Now that thou dost know the rules, wilt thou obey them? More generally, will ye?