Saying "You" instead of "Thou" in Prayer

[zamyrabyrd]

“You” can be singular or plural. “Ye” and “thee” are plural. In Texas “y’all” is singular while “all y’all” is plural.

Yikes, I was talking about modern usage of “you”. I am a college educated, native speaker of English who also teaches. What other word is used for 2nd person in common speech or in modern literature?
There is no evidence that “thou, thy and thee” have been used for plural: “Comfort ye, my people”.
And I also heard “you all” used for plural by Texans.

alt-usage-english.org/pronoun_paradigms.html

“Thou”, “thee”, “thine” and “thy” are pronouns that have dropped out of the main dialects of Modern English. During the period of Early Modern English (~1470-1700), they formed the Second Person Singular of the language, and were standardized by the time of the King James Bible as shown below.

Subjective	 Objective	  Possessive	        Present Tense Verb Ending

1st Pers. Sing. I me my/mine[1] none
2nd Pers. Sing. thou thee thy/thine[1] -est
3rd Pers. Sing. he/she/it him/her/it his/her/its -eth
1st Pers. Plural we us our none
2nd Pers. Plural ye/you[2] you your none
3rd Pers. Plural they them their none

[1]: “Mine” and “thine” were used before “h” and vowels, much as “an” was.
[2]: “You” had replaced “ye” for most plural uses by 1600.

 

[zamyrabyrd]

So the question from the poster is why do we say “You” instead “Thou” both are indicative Pronouns.
You counter that you prefer to use “Thy” which is also a pronoun but let’s see it’s definition: Thy 1. the possessive case of thou (used as an attributive adjective before a noun beginning with a consonant sound): thy table.

Its definition (not “it’s”) shows “thy” is an adjective, not a pronoun. (no need to capitalize “pronoun”)

Compare to what “Thou” means: Notice the distinction, back in the day “You” was ONLY used for the plural OR as formal way of addressing a singular person, for example, someone with more rank than you. Instead and again back in the day, people referred or spoke to GOD with the “Thou” form, that was mainly used amongst FRIENDS. That should tell you something important, me thinks.

Now days in present English usage at least, there is no difference in the pronoun form, used to address your friends or your boss. In fact and this is something that is preponderant in US only when writing to someone people address the recipient with his given name directly. This is a serious breach of etiquette in most European countries as unless you are a personal friend of the person you are writing to, you NEVER use his given name to address him/her in correspondence…

I don’t know what you are getting at, methinks (not “me thinks”). I already quoted a source that says clearly “you” was considered more polite and in effect replaced the different forms of “thou”. Nowadays (not “now days”) people do use first names in speech and correspondence even in Europe.