Native English speakers, when learning their first language other than English, are often surprised (and sometimes confused and puzzled) by the fact that many other languages have several words which can be translated as “you” and if you use the wrong “you” you can insult someone. If we go back a bit in time, we find that English used to have four words for “you”: thou (nominative singular), ye (nominative plural), thee (objective singular), and you (objective plural).
The designation “nominative” simply means that the pronoun is used as the subject of a sentence, while “objective” means that it is used as the object of the sentence.
The word “ye” is one of the old words in English that is often misused. Some people have the mistaken impression that “ye” is somehow an old form of “the” and thus we will see “Ye Olde Coffee Shoppe,” “Ye Olde Gifte Shoppe” and “Ye Olde Editor.” The word “ye” is actually a plural “you” meaning more than one person.
The word “ye” first appears in written English in 950 when a monk, Aldred, at the monastery of Lindisfarne added a word-by-word translation of the Latin text in the Lindesfarne Gospels into Old English. In both Old English and Middle English, “ye” was the second person plural in the nominative case.
Toward the end of the thirteenth century, “ye” began to be used as a singular pronoun. By the middle of the sixteenth century, “ye” and “you” were being used interchangeably. By the eighteenth century, “you” had won the battle and “ye” has survived as a literary or ceremonial form. Thus, courts are sometimes called into session with “Hear Ye, Hear Ye.”
If “ye” means “you” then why do we have the confusing idea that it might also mean “the”? The answer lies not in spoken English, but in written English. Over time the alphabet that we use to represent sounds in written English has changed. In Middle English the runic character ϸ (called a thorn) was retained to represent the “th” sound. Scribes in the fourteenth century wrote a form of the thorn which was nearly identical to “y.” When printing came along, the typesetters set the type the way they saw it in the handwritten manuscripts and so “the” was typeset as “yᵉ” which later became “ye.” While “ye” is properly pronounced as though it was “the” most people who see that word today pronounce it as a “y” rather than as a thorn (ϸ).
Originally, “ēow” (which became “you” in modern English) was used as the object of a verb or preposition. In the fifteenth century, “you” began to be used in the nominative form (which means that it was now being used as the subject of a sentence.) In time, “you” came to replace the singular “thou” as a general second person pronoun. John McWhorter in his Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of a Pure Standard English writes:
“Until the 1600s, you was only used to address two or more people, and thou was used for one person (thou shalt not). Gradually, you came to be used for both one or several people and thou disappeared.”
“You” comes from the Proto-Germanic “*juz” which comes from the Proto-Indo-European “*ju”.
“Thou” comes from the Old English “ϸu” which comes from the Proto-Germanic “*thu” which is from the Proto-Indo-European “tu-” which was a second person singular pronoun. By about 1450, “thou” was used to address inferiors and could provide a sense of insult unless addressing children, servants, or intimates.
The objective singular “thee” comes from the Old English “ϸe” which comes from the Proto-Germanic “*theke” which is from the Proto-Indo-European “tege-”
Until the end of the thirteenth century, by the way, English retained “ink” as a pronoun meaning “you two; your two selves; each other.”
Note: In etymologies, the * indicates that the Proto-Indo-European or prehistoric word has been reconstructed by historical linguists.