... 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)
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
compare also Middle English where the pronouns are still very similar to Modern German ( like "euch" = "eow" )
the plural replacing the singular can be seen in various languages
like in Latin American varieties
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)
Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery
In reply to Re^3: What's the "State Of the Art" way to distribute cli "Apps" on MacOS sans Xcode?
by LanX
in thread What's the "State Of the Art" way to distribute cli "Apps" on MacOS sans Xcode?
by perlfan
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