A HANDY CHART FOR THOSE OF YOU WONDERING WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THESE. NOTE THAT THESE ARE ALL THE INFORMAL AND YOU IS THE FORMAL SO LIKE YOU WOULD ALWAYS ADDRESS YOUR SUPERIOR/ OLDER PERSON/ SOCIAL BETTER WITH YOU BUT WITH YOUR BUDS YOU CAN USE THESE.
To repeat the sentence I used to remember this last time something similar crossed my dash:
Thine octopus doth try to strangle thee. Thou art eating thy calamari.
also thou/thee/thy/thine correspond perfectly to I/me/my/mine. even the “thine (vowel word)” thing, think “mine eyes have seen the promised land”
oh i forgot something else kind of important. words ending in -eth and -est.
-eth is just an older variant of -s for third person singular. the octopus likes/liketh me. he wonders/wondereth what’s going on.
-est is only for thou. thou goest. thou takest. sometimes even in past tense for Some Reason- didst thou see that?
thou knowest. in some dialects in northern england -eth has changed to -s like everywhere else and -est has survived but also changed to -s, this is why the arctic monkeys guy yells “tha knows”. “ya know” “thou knowest”
while we’re here:
here, there, where = this place, that place, which place
hither, thither, whither = to this place, to that place, to which place
hence, thence, whence = from this place, from that place, from which place
So, the 2nd person -s is actually older there. Going all the way back to Old English, there were some northern dialects that had -s as the 2nd person singular. There is, in fact, a theory that that’s actually the origin of the 3rd person singular -s. In Old Norse, the 2nd person singular and 3rd person singular were identical, so the theory goes that in those regions, Old English speakers began to also extend the 2nd person singular -s to the 3rd person singular, which then gradually spread southwards during the Middle English period. Though ironically the 2nd person singular -s did not spread and the southern dialects retained -est until thou itself was lost
The use of -est in past tense verbs was usual in Early Modern English. In Old English, it was only for weak verbs (verbs that form the past tense by adding a suffix, as opposed to the strong verbs which form their past tense by changing a vowel). -est had spread to strong verbs during the Middle English period
