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zikzak025@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

For any curious, basically “I” is to “Me” as “Thou” is to “Thee”.

English used to differentiate singular and plural 2nd person pronouns. “Thou” was the singular 2nd person, and “Ye” was the plural 2nd person (it seems backwards but I swear that’s how it originally was, e.g. the biblical phrase “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”)

“Thee” and “You” were the object versions for these pronouns:

“[I/Thou/We/Ye] give [me/thee/us/you].”

Like French (tu/vous), it became considered polite in English to address singular people using the plural 2nd person, to the extent that the singular version fell out of use entirely. And then on top of that, English stopped differentiating between subject/object forms of the pronoun, with “You” subsuming all 2nd person pronouns.

So the meme is using it wrong, because both would be “thou” as subjects, and that’s before you get into the fact that English at the time also used different verb endings depending on person and plurality.

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