When you are addressing agroup of people as you, how do you
differentiate between speaking to just oneperson? Unlike many of
its linguistic neighbors, English technically only hasone second
person pronoun. Languages like German and French have two words
for you - one for speaking to one person andone for multiple
people, and the second term in many cases doubles as a
moreformal manner of speaking to one person - tu versus vous in
French, forexample.   In earlier times, English did have a
second person plural - ye- while the original first person
singular, the ancestor of you, was thou, which is still used
insome areas. As the influence of French grammatical structures
grew on ourdeveloping language, ye also came to be a more
formal, polite mode of addresswhile thou was the familiar form.
While ye and thou are stillused in rare circumstances in some
areas, they had largely disappeared frommost mainstream English
speech by the end of the 18th century. Theexact reasons why
continues to be a matter of study and