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Comment by gruseom | Hacker News Reader

The 1745 example has another interesting usage: "it's" where we would write "its". When did this become improper? And could it be that all those endless typo "it's"es online nowadays are not part of a plot to drive me crazy after all, but rather the return of some older norm?

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Once, everyone used "'tis" instead of "it's", so there was no danger of confusion with the possessive.

<http://www.word-detective.com/back-d.html>;

That seems like a pretty good website; I'd never heard of it.

So "it's" vs. "its" is yet another johnny-come-lately arbitrary rule without historical basis. Yay, one less thing to get annoyed by.

I would suspect that there were some other rules for apostrophes some centuries ago, but maybe it's/its is some typo that has been in the English language for centuries?

While talking about the English language, does anyone know what happened to thou/thee/thy/thine/ye?

Thou/thee/thy/thine are singular forms, whereas you/ye/your are plural. Just as we and our became royal pronouns, where a monarch would emphasize that they spoke for a whole country by referring to themselves in the plural, it became popular for the upper and eventually middle classes to refer to each other as plural, as a more respectful or formal usage.

Quoting from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou):

"Following a process found in other Indo-European languages, thou was later used to express intimacy, familiarity, or even disrespect, while another pronoun, you, the oblique/objective form of ye, was used for formal circumstances"

Interesting - I've read that the common pronunciation where we use "Ye" pronounced as "Yee" is a mistake - it was always pronounced "The"

It's a vestige of how the Thorne transformed over the years - eventually it looked very similar a Y with a small "e" above it... leading to someone looking at an old document to assume it was just a Y.

We could be talking about two separate uses of the word though....

Just natural evolution of language saw them superseded by alternative words of the same meanings.

The same way in a short period of time words like "cool", "wicked", "fab. [abbrv.]" can rise and fall in cultural popularity, so can words like "thou" and "you".

Thou/thee/thy/thine are still alive in parts of England.

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