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Comment by ironcutter | Hacker News Reader

What were the issues with the declensions?

Not the parent, but "your machine" should probably be "thy machine." "Thou compiler" should be "thy compiler." In general, mapping from 3rd to 2nd person, "he" = "thou", "him" = "thee", and "his" = "thy."

I believe "thou doth do" should just be "thou doth" but I could be mistaken about what "doth" is. :)

Yup, that's about the size of it. Also, "canst maketh" is wrong. "Thou canst make" is correctly conjugated. But I pick nits -- I appreciate the attempt to write about FORTRAN as if one were a 16th century scholar translating the instructions from Aramaic. I had a laugh.

doth is 3rd person singular, so maybe dost ? not sure, have to look it up, 20+ years since I was doing this sort of thing in grad school

Yes, definitely thou dost.

Just to share something I think is fun:

Modern German has separate formal and informal pronouns ("du bist" vs. "Sie sind") and verbs. English used to have them too ("thou art"/"you are"). Even though people assume "thou" is more formal, it's actually the informal/intimate version.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou

Apparently we (~Angles/Saxons) also used to have a separate tense for "a group of exactly two of you" and words like "both" (vs all) and "either" (vs any) are residual traces of this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_(grammatical_number)

I have always enjoyed the insult "I thou thee thou traitor" offered to Sir Walter Raleigh, presumably just before he was executed. There is a semi-plausible explanation of how thou died out in England

https://www.quora.com/English-language-Why-did-people-stop-u...

but it leaves open the question why it persists in other languages.

Well, one thing I noticed was an inconsistency with "thy" and "thine". Which one you use depends on if the following word starts with a vowel, with "thine" before vowels and "thy" otherwise. For example, the article has "in thy own case", as well as, "output thine data". Some investigation seems to lead me to believe that this a more a matter of style, but I still think it sounds wrong.

Quite correct. Spoken English abhors glottal stops, and written English reflects that. Still, it is not as consistent as one might wish in the written record, humans being about 85% logical and 15% irrational and language reflecting that, &c.

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