Lots of people, particularly those familiar with the King James Version of the Bible, probably wonder about the difference between "thou" and "you". It's really pretty simple: "thou" is an archaic second-person singular pronoun, and "you" was originally a second-person plural pronoun. "Thou" faded from use in the 16th and 17th centuries (and was, in fact, quint if not archaic even when the KJV was translated) and almost entirely disappeared from use by the 18th century. In it's place, "you" is now used as both the singular and plural second-person pronoun -- sometimes it refers to you individually, and sometimes it refers to you all as a group.
"Thou" was a much more personal and intimate pronoun because it could only refer to a single person. To the best of my knowledge, English is now one of the only languages without a so-called "tu-vous" (T/V) distinction. No one knows why this is the case, but it seems as if the transition started with the upper classes as early as the 13th century. In modern T/V languages, such as French, I understand that it's considered more respectful to use the V pronoun; T is used in intimate situations or by superiors to inferiors. (Is this right?)
For more information, look up the work by linguist Dick Leith.
Prager had a gy on today talking about the King James Bible, rather interesting. And they discussed the Thou issue and the hebrew transaltions.
tP: Yeah, I caught about 30 seconds of him on the way to work, that's what inspired this post. He was pushing a book or something wasn't he?
The formal/informal distinction has relatively little to do with the number per se. The distance between the informal thou and the formal you is one of social strata, not singular vs. plural. The lack of a distinct pronoun to serve as the plural of thou did force Middle English speakers to address groups in the polite form, as is also the case in modern French (with vous serving both as the plural for the formal vous and the informal tu) and some Latin American dialects of Spanish (e.g., Mexican, where ustedes functions as the plural for both tú and usted), but this doesn't hold across languages generally. In German, for example, the pronoun ihr functions exclusively as the plural for the familiar form du, as vosotros does for tú in Castilian Spanish. So plural does not consistently translate into formal, nor does formal equal plural, etc., although there certainly is some of that going on (witness the royal we).
As to when you can or can't use the familiar form, it varies by language and culture. As a rule of thumb, if you wouldn't feel comfortable addressing somebody by his first name, you probably shouldn't use the familiar form, either, unless your superior has so indicated. It's not uncommon for a Spanish speaker to address his inferiors with tú while expecting to be called "usted" in return, but I've never heard of that happening in German, where the use du by the superior may be interpreted as an invitation to use du in return.
Why so many cultures, including ours, addressed the ultimate superior with "thou" rather than "you" is beyond me. Addressing any other king that way is a good way to lose your head.
Yeah pushing a book (sort of), but who isn't pushing one these days? But it was a typical Prager interview with an author.
I think, Xrlq, that using the familiar pronoun to speak to the Lord is a way of making your relationship with deity more intimate.
Wacky Hermit has it right... nobody knows you better or more personally than God. It even says in the Bible that we are to address God as "Abba", which is like saying "Daddy". God means to be a personal God... the personal pronouns demonstrate this.
All Indo-European languages, to my knowledge, have the familiar/formal distinction, and it's not based on singular vs. plural. German: du/Sie; Russian: ti/vi. David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed points out that what we think of as Quaker archaic use of thee and thou is actually a regionalism of Northumbria, and not peculiar to Quakers in the 17th century.
Wacky Hermit:
I'm sure you're right, but it doesn't really answer my question. If you can't speak that intimately with your own lord, let alone the king of your own country, then how on earth do you get off talking like that toward the toward the king of kings and lord of lords?!
Clayton Cramer:
All Indo-Europeans languages, that is, except the one we're communicating in right now.
Would that be this David Hackett Fischer? If so, sorry, no sale. Anyone who claims a semantic difference between the words "freedom" and "liberty" based on their etymlogical roots is not worth listening to in general, least of all on matters relating to language.
X: As for God and kings, in Christianity anyway an individual can have a much more intimate relationship with God than with any human being, of any station. God wants a close relationship with us. See also Psalm 27, Psalm 73, and Psalm 139, among others.