Comment by tdeck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tdeck | Hacker News Reader

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> Another example many people outside Brazil find interesting: in my family we were taught to never use the formal towards anyone. The rationale is that everyone is equal and that using the formal language was disrespectful because it created an artificial distance between us and the other person. We were also taught never to use the formal language when praying for the same reason.

Interestingly this is why Quakers continued to address people as thou/thee long after everyone else abandoned the practice. Thou was originally the "informal" second person singular pronoun in English, "you" was plural. People used "thou" (the familiar form) in conversations with God. People used "you" as a singular pronoun to be polite. Eventually, "you" overtook thou.

But the Quakers believed that using "you" to show respect was anti-egalitarian and resisted the trend for a long time.

Nowadays because "thou" appears a lot in the King James Bible it tends to be associated with formal, archaic language, so if anything the connotation is the reverse.

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

> People used "thou" (the familiar form) in conversations with God. People used "you" as a singular pronoun to be polite.

Why didn't people address God with "you"?

The wiki article I linked goes into it a bit:

> Early English translations of the Bible used the familiar singular form of the second person, which mirrors common usage trends in other languages. The familiar and singular form is used when speaking to God in French (in Protestantism both in past and present, in Catholicism since the post–Vatican II reforms), German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic and many others (all of which maintain the use of an "informal" singular form of the second person in modern speech). In addition, the translators of the King James Version of the Bible attempted to maintain the distinction found in Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic and Koine Greek between singular and plural second-person pronouns and verb forms, so they used thou, thee, thy, and thine for singular, and ye, you, your, and yours for plural.

That doesn't really explain why people used a more familiar form with God, literally the most powerful anything, than they would with mere strangers.

Christianity began as an episode of Undercover Boss, so it makes perfect sense.

I won't claim this as the one true answer, but one potential reason is that it is encouraged by many religions, including Christian denominations, to have a personal relationship with God. To put it another way, it is exactly God's power which enables God to have a personal relationship with each of us while we, constrained by our own humanity, are only capable of maintaining familiarity with a relatively small number of people.

God is omnipotent and omnipresent after all

It's just a cultural tradition. Not sure what kind of answer you're expecting here.

In English, some prayers came directly from the King James Bible. The singular second-person pronoun in those prayers corresponded with the informal second-person pronoun in the normal spoken or written English of that time. It would have been weird to change the "hallowed be thy name" written in the Bible to "hallowed be your name" when actually praying just to be more formal towards God. Being formal would also not reflect the teaching that Christians have been adopted as sons and daughters of God. I read that "thou" indicated familiarity and affection like between family members and friends and lovers, whereas "ye" indicated distance, and using "ye" towards someone that you'd normally call "thou" would indicate you had a problem with them. So calling God "ye" would require you to rephrase passages in the Bible and might connote that you don't think God has a friendly or familial sort of relationship with Christians, but is far removed from humans or even antagonistic towards them.

In his prayer Jesus did not address YHWH as Adonai (“Lord”) as is customary in Judaism, but as “Papa/Dad”, Abba in Aramaic, and taught his disciples this form of address.

> Why didn't people address God with "you"?

Even today, this tends to be the case in European languages that distinguish familiar and polite pronouns (what linguists call the T-V distinction). God tends to be an exception to the usual T-V rules.

The reason for this is that in all these languages, thou started out as simply the singular and you as the plural, with no politeness dimension at all. Using the plural pronoun (or third person pronouns, etc) for politeness was a fad that only spread around Europe in the Middle Ages (give or take).

Religious formulae, however, are generally extremely resistant to language change. This is a very consistent finding across the world; some of our best evidence in historical linguistics comes from religious texts (such as the Rigveda, the Avesta, etc). Religion tends to be, not surprisingly, a highly conservative and ritualised domain.

Thus, prayers in European languages with the T-V distinction generally retain the use of T forms when addressing God. There are all sorts of lovely folk explanations for this, but the real reason is basically just because prayers predate the T-V system altogether.

Thanks! That actually makes a lot of sense.

That isn't a fossilized exception, it's intentional. God is supposed to be close and personal.

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