... is "you" the plural objective form of "thee".

"Objective" means accusative (direct object) and dative (indirect object) collapsed to one case.

    *I* come humbly once again to beseech *thee*
(nominative)                          (accusative)
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Apparently "thee" was also sometimes used instead of "thou", the plural could be "ye" than.

Most English speaker know these pronouns only from Bible and Shakespeare quotes and are misunderstanding them, e.g. "thou" is actually informal - compare "du" (German), "tu" (various Romance languages)

For those knowing Modern Standard German

• thou = du
• thee = dich / dir
• ye = euch

compare also Middle English where the pronouns are still very similar to Modern German ( like "euch" = "eow" )

edit

the plural replacing the singular can be seen in various languages

like in Latin American varieties

• Spanish vos for tu
• Portuguese voce for tu

My theory is that this is related with "lower class language", England was ruled for centuries by a French speaking class (e.g. Robin Hood vs King John)

Maybe also worth mentioning: In the English language the plural "they" is sometimes (often?) used in modern times to replace the singular "he" and "she" when the gender is unknown or doesn't perfectly fit. Yeah, all that equal rights and LQBT* stuff can get complicated and certainly has an effect on language.

* or whatever the acronym is this week. That, too, seems to get more complicated all the time.

It sounds weird at first, but it makes writing and reading stuff on the internet a lot easier and prevents accidentally offending someone. Instead of having to write "he/she" or "(s)he", just use "they". So, for example, it would be "LanX wrote a post. They said...". Which has the benefit of not having to virtually stalk LanX to find out what gender (if any) LanX feels like having today.

As a side note: This would probably have confused Shakespeare less then you'd think. All their actors were male because of the culture of the time. So, technically, Romeo and Juliet, one of the most well known romance if theater history, were both dudes (probably, who knows), one of them wearing female clothes, and you would have to switch gender when talking about them, depending on their stage character or their person.

perl -e 'use Crypt::Digest::SHA256 qw[sha256_hex]; print substr(sha256_hex("the Answer To Life, The Universe And Everything"), 6, 2), "\n";'

> This would probably have confused Shakespeare less then you'd think.

Even less than you think. Singular they says:

The singular they emerged by the 14th century, about a century after the plural they.

map{substr$_->[0],$_->[1]||0,1}[\*||{},3],[[]],[ref qr-1,-,-1],[{}],[sub{}^*ARGV,3]

> find out what gender (if any) LanX feels like having today.

Some documents still say Lana, but I'll have them rewritten soon.

Cheers Lance
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery}