Thee, thou, ye, etc...

What is the difference between these (thee, thou, ye)?

What is correct: "I woot thou wel" or "I woot thee wel" ? To me, the first one sound correct.

What are the other Middle English/Early Modern English pronouns? Does anyone know of any sites?

http://members.tripod.com/babaev/archive/grammar42.html#5
There is this site. I hope it's helpful.

The Geoffrey Chaucer website has a lot on Middle English. It's very interesting.

http://icg.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/pronunciation/

Clark,

The difference between "thee" and "thou" is easy as pie. The word "thee" is the object of the sentence/question/exclaimation/etc. and the word "thou" is the subject. Have a look at this, it makes things easy to remember.

Subject: 1st/2nd person singular
I/thou

Object: 1st/2nd person singular
me/thee

Possesive adjective: 1st/2nd person singular
my/thy

Possesive pronoun: 1st/2nd person singular
mine/thine

Reflexive pronoun: 1st/2nd person singular
myself/thyself

Therefore not "I woot thou wel" but "I woot thee wel" is correct. Looking around for the meaning of "woot" I stumbled on
http://www.haverford.edu/engl/chaucer/grammar.htm
which is a decent site. On this site you can see that "ye" is the 2nd person plural object.

Beware, though, of "ye" as a spelling of "the". When printing presses came to England the lazy bastards never bothered to make blocks for the letter thorn so we lost a really useful letter. Thorn was usually replaced by "th" but sometimes "y" was used because it looks a bit similar ... I think "p" is closer. Hence you have "Ye Olde Shoppe" and the like, which, if you ask me, would best be pronounced "The Olde Shoppe".

MM

WHAT! We woulda had 27 letters?! Life would have been easier if we had "thorn". Not really but helpful.

When I first saw these words "Beethoven" and "Foothill" and "Mathesen"
I got confused on the "th" part. (I'm a natv. English speaker.) Thorn would have helped alot. I kept saying 'bay-thoven' instead of
'bay-toven'. I said 'Foo-thill' not 'foot-hill' (my school's name). And I said 'Ma-thee-sin', not 'Maht-hay-zen" (<--that one was wierd, it's my friend's last name)

Same with Othalya, another friend's name. I gave in to that t-h separately thing. I said "Ot-ha-lya" in my west coast way when I read her name at first, once. She said, "What? Don't you know Enklish pronouncinks? You know more Enklish zen me ant your ze only one I know who pronounce my name wronk." She was joking around thankfully. (I realized that I still don't know what language she speaks. I'll ask later) She pronounced it "O-thay-li-a"

Thorn would have been helpful.

If I could go back in time...

MP & BB,
Kiani

Another one is "neanderthal" people often put a "th" as in "thing" there where it doesn't belong.

There was eth and ash too.

Good old 'eth'. Don't forget yogh, either.

Do they come out I wonder. ð þ þ

Great!

I was wondering wheðer or not ðese þings were possible.

I didn't get your discussion about 'thorn'. What was exactly 'thorn' ? a letter ? how was it pronounced ? Like a 'th' ? give some examples.
thanks.

Well nowadays we think:

Thorn (þ) = the TH in 'thing'
Eth (ð) = the TH in 'then'

However in practice, much like V/F Z/S tended to have one pronunciation (in each pair), eth and thorn in a given dialect were either all voiced or unvoiced. In other words, they were just different ways of writing the same sound.

Icelandic still uses these letters, having got them from Old English.

You can't see it with the computer version but the bulge of thorn points upwards in calligraphy making it look like a 'y', which is what Jim was talking about

þe olde shoppe.

Þorn, eð, æsh, yogh ænd wynn are all letters. Ðey are not used in modern English, which is a shame, but some of ðem are still used in Icelandic. Some of ðem were adapted from ðe Latin Ælphabet whilst oðers originated from ðe Fuþorc (ðe Runic Ælphabet). Here is a site about ðe Icelandic Ælphabet.

http://www.isholf.is/halfdanh/alphabet.htm

Æ æ Ð ð þ & þ bring ðem back!

I should say Æ æ Ð ð Þ & þ ... Ðe first þorn in Þ ðe capital.