'Bottom, thou art translated.'

[davem]

Originally Posted by Lalaith

Old Yorkshire people do still use thee and thy, in the old-style intimacy way. When I was a student, m neighbour, a pensioner, used to lean over the fence and say, "I do worry about thee, pet, so far away from thy parents.

Not s'much o' the 'owd'.... 'ah've bin nown tu use 'thee's' & 'tha;s' mesen....

[Lalwendë]

Yep, tykes of all ages still use thee and thou. In Sheffield though they use dee and dar - hence the unpleasant but quite funny nickname Deedars. This is interesting as something I was reading the other day about Scousers suggested that they do the same thing, and it's due to the Irish influence; there is little to no use of 'th' in Irish Gaelic, they use 'dh' instead, hence Dublin. You also hear the difference in the contrast between the Liverpudlian "maidering' and the Mancunian "maithering".

It's not just restricted to Yorkshire and Liverpool though, as plenty of Lancastrians still use words like "tha" as in "Hast tha had tha tea?" I reckon that in Tolkien's day you'd still have been able to hear plenty of West Midlands locals theeing and thying.

So I'm not so sure that 'thee' and 'thy' are 'formal' in English as spoken by British people at all, as they still have pretty much entrenched usages amongst Northerners and the working classes.

Originally Posted by Esty

Dear me, I can vividly remember the days when one did not dream of addressing an older person by her/his first name unless specifically invited to do so! And this tradition still holds here in Germany, at least partially, especially so in a formal setting such as business and education.

My father is still shocked that I told him we do not address superiors at work by their formal titles but simply use first names. Likewise, I often write to a variety of Ministers, Sirs and University Vice Chancellors and always address them by their first names - whether in a hard copy formal letter or by e-mail. That is the 'form' apparently, as we must count such people as colleagues.

However in schools, students right up to the age of 18/19 are expected to directly address their teachers as "Sir" or "Miss", never by name or horror of horrors, by first name! It was always a game for a class full of new pupils to try and guess what your first name might be.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

By contrast, apparently dating from the egalitarian Jefferson, faculty at the University of Virginia are always adressed as 'Mister" or 'Ms"- never Doctor or Professor.