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Comment by ryangittins | Hacker News Reader

I've had enough of this discussion! The new gender-neutral singular pronoun is thou! That's right, thou was the answer we were looking for.

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I think thou is second person ("you"), not third ("he" and "she"). We are in need of a second person plural though--at least outside of the South where they have "y'all" and NJ where they have "youse guys".

Let's not forget about the folk's from the "Show Me" state's second-person plural: "Ya'llsins"

Don't forget "all y'all" when referring to more than a couple people.

"Y'all" is plural, "all y'all" is more plural.

In conversations with people who also speak multiple languages, I've sometimes explained the distinction between "y'all" and "all y'all" as similar to the one between "allí" and "allá" in Spanish. Both "allí" and "allá" mean "there" (as opposed to "aquí", "here"), but "allá" is further away in a progression; informally you could translate it as "way over there".

For instance, suppose you know a family of people. Two people out of that family are currently visiting you. You might say "Y'all should bring the whole family over next time; all y'all are welcome anytime." The first "y'all" refers to the two people visiting; the "all y'all" refers to the whole family.

I've heard "These, them, or those?" used to indicate a 3-step progression.

> We are in need of a second person plural though

What about "Vou" from the French "Vous" ?

Is "thou" third-person though? I never use it, so it might be. I dunno.

It's second-person. The third person singular pronoun is "it".

It's the informal version of 'you', so it is second-person singular.

You can use 'thou' to force Google translate to translate from English to the informal form of another language. Otherwise, it will give you the formal translation. This is safer if you don't know the social/cultural implications of using the informal form (it can be insulting or inappropriate in some contexts), but it's not always what you want.

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