Rich Mintz  

I’m familiar with the way Quakers speak in olde-tymey historical novels — typically, there are a lot of “thee”s — but now I’m reading Edward Rutherfurd’s novel New York, and a Quaker character is using “thee” as the subject of her sentences.

Now, I know enough to know (and this is one of those exceedingly rare moments in life when having studied “The Wanderer” in the original Old English in college has some practical usefulness) that “thee” is not a nominative pronoun; in (affected) modern English it can stand in for the direct or indirect object, but not the subject. Right?

But Rutherfurd is not an idiot, and (from my position about 20% into this book) it seems to me he has been at least moderately thoughtful about accuracy of all kinds. If he had meant “thou,” he surely would have said it. Which leads me to wonder, did 18th-century Philadelphia Quakers also say “thee” when they meant “thou”? And if so, why?

Well, what do you know? I’m the ignorant one: “thee” in the nominative case is perfectly normal among speakers of this dialect, through the same path by which our familiar “you” in the nominative case (for the more technically correct “ye”) has come to sound perfectly normal.

And if you’re curious about Quakers, Quaker Jane is as interesting a place to start as any; I found this page on why women opt for plain dress to be thoughtful and thought-provoking.

Tags: language

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