Romeo and Juliet used it. So did Ruth, David and Jesus, according to the early Bible translators. So, in the centuries that followed, poets, lovers and preachers have slipped back into this archaic dialect. Even Langston Hughes, who loved the American vernacular, chose it when he wrote to his “Black Beloved.”
I’m talking about the use of “thee and thou.” Although almost no one uses this dialect any more—that is, except some Quakers, and I’ll get to that later. We teach it to our children every time we have them say, “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name.”
To get a handle on this dialect, let me tell you why we English speakers find it quaint. First of all, it’s because modern English, unlike many other languages, has left us with only one word for “you.” That’s right. English, with its massive vocabulary, is so poor that it now only has one word.
It wasn’t always like that. In the Middle Age and Renaissance, English had more than one word for the second-person pronoun. There were three subject pronouns—the familiar “thou,” the formal “you,” and the plural “ye.”
First, let’s distinguish between singular and plural. In William Tyndale’s 1526 translation of the New Testament, we read: Ye are the salt of the erthe, and ye are the light of the worlde. Here, Jesus uses the plural ye when he is talking to more than one person.
On the other hand, when he is talking with one person, as to the woman at the well, he says, from the King James Bible: If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water.
Nice thing, that ability in language to know if the speaker is addressing just one, or many people, by the pronoun he or she uses. Unfortunately, today’s Standard English leaves us stranded. We make up for it, however, with our own vernacular for the plural you. “You guys, y’all, youse,” etc. Not “proper” English, but it gets the job done.
But there’s something else going on in Jesus’ use of the “thou,” suggestive of his relationship with the woman.
In Shakespeare’s time, you had the option—as you still have in modern French, Spanish or German—of using “thou” or “you.” Common practice was to use “you” with your superiors, strangers, or in formal situations. But to your peers, your close friends, or with those below your social level, servants included, you would use the familiar “thou.”
In Romeo and Juliet, we first see this distinction in a conversation between Juliet’s nurse and Lady Capulet. Reminiscing on Juliet’s childhood, the nurse addresses Lady Capulet as “you,” showing respect, while Juliet’s mother responds using the familiar “thou.”
“You” was polite and formal. “Thou” was familiar. It was personal. But—and this is important—it was also the language of intimacy, the language of lovers.
Both Romeo and Juliet, when they first meet, without even knowing each other’s names, use the “you” form of address. At their next encounter, however, now love-struck, they slip into the language of intimacy: “O, speak again, bright angel! for thou art as glorious to this night, being o’er my head as is a winged messenger of heaven.”
And Juliet: “O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?” Why, my love, she is asking, must you have the name of my family’s enemy?
Whether the speaker uses “you” or “thou” is an indicator of their relationship, and this carries through in Shakespeare’s sonnets as well. To his beloved, as he is now an old man, Shakespeare writes in Sonnet 73:
“This perceiv’st thou, which makes thy love more strong/ To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.”
It’s still that way in other languages today. When addressing someone in Spanish, you use tu or Usted. In French, tu or Vous. In German, du or Sie. Using the wrong word, however, can get you into trouble. Which it did when I was a teenager in Germany, when I addressed Frau Liebig, the mother of my friend, with the familiar du rather than Sie.
“Do you address your elders like that in America?” she asked. When I explained that in America we spoke to everyone in the same way, she smiled. “But you shouldn’t here,” she said.
I learned that I could use du with my friends and my immediate family. But with other adults, teachers, employers, seniors, strangers—be sure to use the Sie form, she explained, along with its appropriate verb conjugations and the correct objective and possessive pronouns. In all, I would learn, there are seven words in German for “you.”
At the same time, however, when I attended the local Lutheran church, I heard the pastor pray using the familiar form of speech with God. Wow, I thought. I could use du with God! And so I learned: Vater unser, du der bist in Himmel, dein Name werde geheiligt….
So it once was in English. What we think of as church talk, or high talk, was the opposite. Thee and thou was the language of low talk, used with those we were “down with,” with those we love, and, remarkably, with our Father in heaven.
That’s why Quakers, those radical reformers from England, chose to use “thee and thou” even when everyone else had stopped using it. And, in so doing, they were making a statement about the equality of all people.
So here’s to the “Thee and Thou” of the Lord’s Prayer, and to all the funny verbs and pronouns that go along with them, Here’s to our freedom to talk to God as if we are speaking with our closest friend—whether we use archaic or modern English, formal grammar or street dialect. It’s all there in the words we choose.
Art: detail of 1884 painting of Romeo and Juliet by Frank Bernard Dicksee
Ben Jacques Stories 