ANOTHER GAPING ISSUE IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: THE SECOND-PERSON PRONOUN: "There is no such thing as a singular "you."

The English language is a flawed species – that we have ascertained previously on several occasions. The fact remains that we communicate with it nonetheless every day of our lives, as do millions of others all over the world. Among these disparate peoples, two groups are spared the malady that will occupy today's discussion: the society of Friends (also known as Quaker -others including Shakers and Amish may also be included) and the less-educated social classes among unitedstatesians if not in England and elsewhere.The issue in question is the second-person pronoun, singular and plural forms of which coalesced during the period when we spoke “Middle English,” i.e., roughly 1150-1500. The language evolved significantly in a direction away from inflection toward becoming analytical, i.e., relying far more on word order, juxtapositions, and prepositions and less on gender, conjugation, and declension to define the relations among words that form a sentence. Albert C. Baugh (A History of the English Language, 2d ed., New York, 1957) blames this massive simplification process on the Norman Conquest, which, “by making English the language mainly of uneducated people, …made it easier for grammatical changes to go forward unchecked.” A similar simplification process continues today at the level of phonetics, attacking those traditional, unpronounceable spellings that reveal the vestiges of our ancestral Germanic Muttersprach in such guttural clusters as “ght” and “cht.”

Greek grammar has evolved in a similar fashion between antiquity and now.

We must roll with the tide. But in this process English gags in a number of ways, having, as I mentioned above, thrown out the baby with the bathwater (how did that cliché originate?). As our system of personal pronouns became vastly simplified, we generalized the second-person plural to apply also to the second person singular, “you” now in both cases. English is the only language I know of that came to coalesce in this fashion. All other languages persist in distinguishing between these two forms. Originally, Old English gave us “thou” and, for objective cases, i.e., other than nominative, “thee.” The plural counterpart “ye” evolved to its objective form, “you,” and then spread to encompass those delightful biblical forms you can still hear among the more conservative Quakers and find in equally conservative liturgical passages, including the King James Bible. What Middle English accomplished was to take what was evidently the polite, more distant form of the second person pronoun and extend it to replace the familiar form most languages still use, e.g., “tu” in French and Spanish. On the face of it, this seems rather an elegant gesture among the so-called plebs; according to Mühlhauser and Harré, Pronouns & People (Oxford 1990), "the England of the twelfth century was dominated by a Norman French upper class." French usage was the model for "socially proper uses of language." So the Norman influence both gentrified and the reverse; among twentieth-century English vernaculars the movement has been toward reinventing the second-person plural: e.g., “y’all” in the southern United States, “yiz” as close by as Trenton, NJ, “you guys” among children, “you ‘uns” closer to the Midwest, etc., not that the trend began in this century, but it certainly proliferates. And whereas our generalized "you" is a polite form, this second-person ad hoc plural functions analogously to the familiar "tu" forms of other languages - in other words, our vernacular second-person plural is informal while our grammatical pronoun(s) are formal. The functions have traded number, at this level.

Our "flawful" language is therefore burdened by the paradox that biblical and religious language preserves the familiar form of “you” (thou) even in addressing God while a wave of intellectual degeneracy combined with its inverse, gentrification, is blamed for the politesse of our coalesced second-person pronouns. This “you” form suffers from lack of not only gender but, uniquely among English personal pronouns, also number (compare French “se,” which shares these qualities but is not so generalized as “you”).** The first and third person forms have at least number (first) if not number and gender (third). What plague so focused such full venom on one inflectional form, and why? What is it about the second person pronoun that it should be so stripped of markers, when linguists will not even allow it the status of “unmarked” they reserve for the third person? One can say that the disease is curable. In other words, when I address a roomful of people and say “you,” I can modify this with “people” and/or add some sort of clarifying gesture if needed. Man is, after all, a political animal, and that means women are too. We just understand some things. However, the language/culture of hand gestures is far more likely to augment a romance language or one otherwise closer to the Equator, for whatever reason. English is more restrained; despite the melting pot, we are still largely a Puritan culture wherein only the most severely puritanical element distinguished between “thou/thee” and “you” -- they and the speakers of street vernacular and the children. the latter two groups who have, for some reason, forced the most precise levels of clarity and precision out of English vocabulary itself.

I conclude further only that this peculiar mutation occurred in England and evolved with cultural, both gentrifying and generalizing, trends, to dim the distinction between singular and plural and isolate the second person pronoun as least in need of any sort of definition.† Consider John Donne’s immortal line “No man is an island.” Perhaps the minute we say “you,” there is, in fact, more than one because it presumes an “I” or “we” to generate the concept (this concept has been probed by linguists of the Prague School, among others, this century). The English , perhaps at the semi-conscious level, refused to equate “oneness” with the second person singular? Consider though, that in nearly the next sentence of Meditation XVII, Donne continues, “…never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee,” a quasi-religious archaism. By Donne’s time, according to the grammars and the surviving texts, English existed in virtually the form we write, if not speak, today. So if Donne holds out a clue, he immediately and gleefully retracts it.

I rest my case, awaiting further clues, expecting that, if there are any, they exist in the realm of psycholinguistics, cultural and historical factors having been largely accounted for.

(c)

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**Mühlhauser and Harré cite 13 different ways Portuguese can express "You were there; I saw you."

†A related phenomenon may be the non-IndoEuropean "paucal" that refers to a "few": pronoun numbers like "I and you," "I and somebody/others but not you," according to a book on Latin philology by B. Krostenko, University of Chicago

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