| 词组 | thou |
| 释义 | thou Thou was once the common form of the second person singular pronoun. In other words, it was once normal to address another person as "thou." In the period of Middle English, however, thou (and the related forms thee, thy, and thine) was gradually replaced by the plural you (and your), first in addressing a person of high social rank (as in "your majesty") and later in addressing a social equal. Thou was used only in speaking to a person of inferior social position, such as a servant, and it was eventually superseded by you even in this use. In Modern English, thou has been most familiar as a formal alternative to you in prayers and poetry: • Thou still unravag'd bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time—John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," 1819 Thou has also persisted in more general use in some dialects—most notably, perhaps, in the language of the Friends (that is, the Quakers). An interesting feature of some dialectal usage, including that of the Friends, is that the accusative form thee ("I shall teach thee") occurs in place of the nominative thou ("Thou shalt learn from me") and is used with verbs inflected in the third person singular, so that instead of saying, "Thou hast forgotten" a Friend will say, "Thee has forgotten." • I remember in court when they were going to indict a Norwegian Quaker ... his wife said, "Simon, thee must go to jail." —Harry Terrell, quoted in Studs Terkel, Hard Times, 1970 Exactly how this nominative use of thee developed is not known. |
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