Don't Get Familiar with Me!

Don't Get Familiar with Me!

Like many students know, English has only one 2nd person way of addressing people, both singular and plural:  you.  But what does this word mean?

Well, as it so happens, many languages have both a familiar and a formal term to use when addressing others:

*Brazilian Portuguese has nearly totally lost all trace of the familiar tu to standardize the você form for both formal and familiar, with the plural being vocês.

English, contrary to the above languages but like other languages such as Brazilian Portuguese, no longer makes a difference between formal and familiar.  

Did you catch that adverbial?  "No longer."  This means that English did indeed at one point have a different 2nd person.  English kept the formal way of addressing others you and lost the familiar!  You might think this odd, but actually it is quite common:  on the French island of Réunion in the south Indian Ocean near Madagascar, the local creole spoken all over the island tends to prefer the formal vous for all uses in the singular, creating a periphrastic pronoun vou z'autres for the plural.

Many students, when reading Shakespeare or other authors before the 1830-1850 period when our modern English actually became contemporary, have encountered the familiar pronoun already:

You pronounce thou using the same /th/ phoneme as in the or those and the /ou/ diphthong is pronounced as /ow/ in cow.  It is accompanied by a full set of both declensions and conjugations:

So now when Hamlet, in Act 3, Scene 1, says to Ophelia, "Get thee to a nunnery," only the final word will pose problems (nunnery = a convent).

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Today, use of this term has disappeared.  The only places -- besides Shakespeare, Marlowe and other authors or the Bible -- that you would be able to hear it being used would be religious communities like the Quakers, who pride themselves in keeping long-past traditions, or else in Appalachia in the United States, which has retained previous usages purely out of isolation.  However, with the strong influence of television and the media, it is very likely that even there the word will disappear, if it hasn't already disappeared.