Quote Originally Posted by archon_huskie View Post

Many people believe that you is the second person singular and the plural form fell out of usage. But it is really the other way around. You is the plural and Ye was the singular. Sort of. they were spelled with that TH letter instead of Y and the usage changed during the shift from Old to Middle English.
You're not quite correct here. "þe" was the original form of "the", and was replaced with "Ye" for a while after the thorn was eliminated (to make mechanical typing easier) until slight changes in pronunciation caused the digraph "th" to be pronounced identically to "þ". The pronunciation was always "the". "Ye" has only ever been a replacement for "þe" in phrases such as "Ye Olde Shoppe" or "Ye Mill", never in ones such as "Get ye hence."


Ye (pronounced /jiː/), was the second-person plural counterpart to thou/thee/thy/thine (all forms of the same word) with the modern "you" being formed as a formal variant of thou. It was never spelled with a thorn.