3 ms·

No, I don't believe that's correct. Thou is intimate, you is formal.

• dkarl 16y ago
  Try using "thou" in an intimate situation, and your partner will be waiting for a Holy Grail punchline.... But seriously, "thou" just doesn't exist in modern English for the vast majority of English speakers on the planet. They use "thou" when they're quoting or reciting older texts, or when they want to make something new sound like something old. For instance, someone writing a prayer might sprinkle it with "thee" and "thou" to mimic the prayers and scriptures he's familiar with, because it puts him in a religious frame of mind. People who do that kind of thing tend to be inconsistent (just like when people use mock-archaic language for comedic purposes) and their usage would probably defy grammatical description.
  • djacobs 16y ago
    Okay, I'll try this approach. "You" is both intimate and formal today for native English speakers. There is no distinction between the two cases. For the Greeks and Early Modern English and really everyone except "modern" native English speakers, there is a distinction between the two, and "thou" is the closest translation we have. Much as you might not like it, it is not incorrect to translate another language's intimate second-person pronoun into English as "thou" because, in fact, that is the closest approximation we have. Or, if you prefer, we could start saying "You-familiar should know you-familiar's self."
    • dkarl 16y ago
      There's no graceful way to make the distinction in modern English, and the distinction isn't important to the phrase being translated. Why go out of your way to preserve it, to the extent of using awkward or archaic language? "Know yourself" doesn't have the ring of authority and solemnity that "Know thyself" does, but when you think about why "Know thyself" sounds that way to an English speaker, it doesn't make any sense at all to exploit that connotation. (That is, unless Socrates himself would have approved of exploiting religiously tinged language to bypass rational skepticism. That doesn't sound like the Socrates I've heard about, but I must confess that I know Socrates mostly by reputation.) Different languages make many different distinctions, and translations are inevitably lossy. Translation would be an impossible job if translators didn't feel free to drop distinctions that, in their view, aren't essential to the meaning of the text. For example, in a Spanish news article about a criminal's appearance in court, the gender of the criminal's lawyer might be evident, but if the lawyer is not mentioned by name, the lawyer's gender would probably not be evident in the English translation. There's nothing wrong with that, unless there happens to be some special reason why the lawyer's gender is relevant to the story.