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I just learned the other day that in English "you" is the old formal.
Here in Pennsylvania, we know that Quakers used thee and thou far longer than anyone else. Turns out, that was a protest movement. You and yours were used for nobility and royalty, the piece I was reading said the "royal we" is a leftover from this setup.
As a protest against classism and politics, Quakers refused to use you and yours at all and used thee and thou for everyone regardless of status. Instead, common usage English went the other way and adopted you and yours for everyone.
My mother met old Quaker ladies in the 1950s who still used thee and thou in common conversation.
I saw that video too recently. Was it one of Rob's? English dude, lives in Berlin?
Fun consequence of this: the ten commandments should be translated into WAY less formal English if want to be traditional.
"No murders y'all" weirdly doesn't have the same punch when engraved on a stone tablet, though. (And most Americans can't read ancient Hebrew.)
The ten commandments are future imperatives, but English doesn’t have that mood and instead archaic language is used in place of it.
They are as strong a command as can be given, but a literal translation would just be “you will not”. That lacks the weight of the original form so translators try to make it read more seriously than the language allows with “thou shalt not”.
Except "thou" in "thou shalt not kill" is the singular pronoun, while "you" would be the plural...
I have no idea what number was implied in the original Hebrew.
Well, maybe. If thou is for peasants, then the implication the commandments are directed specifically at the non-royal?
No. OP got the premise a bit wrong, for one thing. And usually it was other poor people that did the sanctioned killing, anyway - it's dirty unpleasant work that a king would have avoided in the Early Modern period.
I recently (re?)learned that "you" was the plural form and only became a formal form under the influence of French.
Basically, "you" was "ye"/"y'all"/"youse"/"yins" before any of those existed, and the others only came into existence when "you" became formal and stopped filling that niche.
And some dialects, including some very populous ones like standard British English, still don't have a plural "you" as a result of that change of usage. The subsequent shift to being generic only cemented the problem.
"You" regains its plurality in things like "all of you", "you all", "you lot" (not really for the politest of company) and "you " (e.g. "You four, go sit over there") for a group of people, but on its own it's ambiguous.