well - depends on whether we are talking second person familiar or second person formal. Thee was familiar, thou formal, You (which some people argue was actually pronounced 'thou' - but when printing became common the less educated read the thorn as a 'y' and it became 'you' )

MMario touched on the answer to part of this discussion, and I'll give illustrations. There will be a test following the lecture.

What is being discussed here is "grammar," which is another word in linguistic circles for "manners." We all communicate, and whether we use Yous or You or Thou, we make ourselves understood. That is communications. How we do it, the words we choose ("grammar"), are simply a form of manners, (does one know the proper word to choose in which occasion? Is a subject or object or direct object involved, i.e. who/whom discussions?).

We're also seeing the effect of the printing press. The "Thou vs You" discussion comes from the removal by early printers of the "thorn" or Th combination. Th was simplified to Y. So "Ye Olde Coffee Shoppe" should be pronounced THE Olde Coffee Shoppe because the Y is supposed to represent the TH sound. But we can read and we know what Y in most instances is supposed to sound like so we've corrupted this spoken bit of our language in preference to the written form.

I learned this the hard way, so pay attention, any of you who think your English is so superior to anyone else's that you must correct them. Back in my uppity undergraduate days when I must have thought I was god's gift to the English language I took a letter from a friend, corrected his English, and mailed it back. And promptly lost that friend. Someone told me years later why I'd never heard from him again--that he'd been devastated by this little act that I hadn't thought about in years. I hope you're all blushing as you read this--I am as I write it. It was unconscionable. I had a wonderful class in the mid-1990's on the History and Development of the English Langauge. I remember, at the beginning of the class, thinking how amusing it must sound when this professor, with a broad West Texas accent, taught Shakespeare (another of his specialties) with that accent. As we proceeded through the course, I realized how snobbish I'd been. And now I make a point to focus on what people are trying to say. We all use language differently, and post colonial theorists will tell you that captive cultures have wonderfully witty ways of "signifying" to get double meanings into their use of English (in this context) as the colonizer's language. Language serves lots of masters.

All of this said, before my master's in English and learning all of this great stuff, I didn't want my children to grow up with a Texas drawl, so I corrected them if they came home from school or play with some of these dipthongs peppering their speech. I'm from north of Seattle, and have Norwegian inflections in my English. I have realized that my children are bilingual. At home they speak English that to my ears is unaccented. But with their friends they have a few Texas terms that creep in. I now know better than to worry about it.

SRS