yellbug:
hey when you make posts, i just want you to know, thou/thee/thy/thine/ye are like he/you(object)/your/yours/you(subject) okay? “thou art wearing shoes,” “i will wear shoes for thee,” okay?
you say thine if the next word starts with a vowel and thy if the next word starts with a consonant and they both mean “your” so “thine own shoes,” “thy shoes,” okay?
and ye means you and refers to the subject of a sentence, “ye members of the brotherhood of shoes,” okay? you need this information to create better knight yaoi. i’m personally more interested in nun yuri but we are a community
Okay, this is mostly correct but still has a few misleading omissions that appear to be confusing people, so I will once again beg everybody to go look this up from an actual academic source (no, not ChatGPT; no, not Reddit; no, not Quora; no, not Stack Exchange) if you really care about getting it right. Something like this. Or even just the Wikipedia articles for thou and ye.
1. I assume OP stuck a “he” in here (which is confusing people in the notes) as an attempt to indicate that “thou” is in the nominative case. Because “he” is another word that’s in the nominative case. Even though it means something completely different.
2. All the words beginning with “t” (thou/thee/thy/thine) are the informal singular. That means you use them only when addressing an individual that you’re relatively intimate with. “Ye” and “you”, on the other hand, can be either plural or formal (or both). So if you’re talking to multiple people and/or people in a higher social position, you’d use ye/you instead.
3. “Thou” is the subject and “thee” is the object. Thus, thou performeth an action, but an action is done to thee.
4. Similarly, “ye” is the subject and “you” is the object. (For groups of people and for individuals of high rank, remember.)
5. OP’s explanation of thy/thine is almost correct: it’s exactly the same word and merely varies depending on the initial sound of the word immediately following it. So if the following word starts with a consonant sound (like “dog” or “yellow” or “university”), you’d use “thy”. If it starts with a vowel sound (like “egg” or “owl” or “heir”), you’d use “thine”.
6. “Thine” is also the informal singular equivalent of “yours”. “It is yours”, converted to the informal singular, becomes “It is thine.” You would never say “It is thy.”
7. Also, addressing some of the comments in the notes: this is not “Old English”. The corresponding Old English pronouns would be þu/þec/þe/þin (singular), git/incit/inc/incer (dual) and ge/eowic/eow/eower (plural). Old English clearly has nothing to do with all this.
But most importantly: This stuff is actually rather complicated and the best way to learn it properly is by reading lots of Early Modern English and picking it up automatically. But that takes years and lots of effort, and if you want to write knight yaoi, honestly you should just go ahead and do it without worrying about getting this stuff right. Just know that you’re probably not getting it right, and that’s fine, and most of your readers won’t know or care. And don’t necessarily trust random people on Tumblr to understand these sorts of linguistic rules correctly.*
*Yes, that includes me. If, despite my exhortation in that last paragraph above, you still decide you want to learn to use all these pronouns properly, then please don’t trust ANY post on Tumblr, including this one, to be your “Holy Grail” explanation. As I said at the beginning: if this truly matters to you, do a few minutes of proper research and find a trustworthy academic source.
This post is going around again with sooooo much misinformation in the notes, so I am reblogging my own explanation above :’)
