You might think of “thou” and “ye” as “Bible language.” It’s true that older Bible versions like the King James use “thee” and “thou” and “ye” as well as “you.”
It wasn’t just the language of the Bible, though—it was ordinary English then. It was the English used by Shakespeare, whose plays are filled with “thees” and “thous.”
Modern English is simpler: We use “you” for both singular and plural, both subject and object. This seems like a great improvement—but not necessarily.
In the older versions, the different forms of “you” had different meanings. “Thou” and “thee” were singular, “ye” and “you” were plural. “Thou” and “ye” were subjects, “thee” and “you” were objects.
So the four words weren’t just all saying the same things as “you.” The words preserved some of the distinctions in the original Hebrew and Greek.
In the Kings James Version, for example, the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20 begin with “Thou shalt”—“thou” is singular, so the Commandments were addressed to each individual person, not just Israel as a whole.
All modern versions have “you shall”— which could be plural or singular.
