Early Modern English

===Pronouns===
Early Modern English had two second-person personal pronouns: ''[[thou]]'', the informal singular pronoun, and ''ye'', the plural (both formal and informal) pronoun and the formal singular pronoun.

"Thou" and "ye" were both common in the early 16th century (they can be seen, for example, in the disputes over [[Tyndale]]'s translation of the Bible in the 1520s and the 1530s) but by 1650, "thou" seems old-fashioned or literary. It has effectively completely disappeared from Modern [[Standard English]].

The translators of the ''King James Version'' of the Bible (begun 1604 and published 1611, while Shakespeare was at the height of his popularity) had a particular reason for keeping the informal "thou/thee/thy/thine/thyself" forms that were slowly beginning to fall out of spoken use, as it enabled them to match the [[Hebrew]] and [[Ancient Greek]] distinction between second person singular ("thou") and plural ("ye"). It was not to denote reverence (in the ''King James Version'', God addresses individual people and even Satan as "thou") but only to denote the singular. Over the centuries, however, the very fact that "thou" was dropping out of normal use gave it a special aura and so it gradually and ironically came to be used to express reverence in hymns and in prayers.{{Citation needed|date=February 2012}}

Like other personal pronouns, ''thou'' and ''ye'' have different forms dependent on their [[grammatical case]]; specifically, the objective form of ''thou'' is ''thee'', its possessive forms are ''thy'' and ''thine'', and its reflexive or emphatic form is ''thyself''.

The objective form of ''ye'' was ''you'', its possessive forms are ''your'' and ''yours'' and its reflexive or emphatic forms are ''yourself'' and ''yourselves''.

The older forms "mine" and "thine" had become "my" and "thy" before words beginning with a consonant other than ''h'', and "mine" and "thine" were retained before words beginning with a vowel or an ''h'', as in ''mine eyes'' or ''thine hand''.
{{Early Modern English personal pronouns (table)}}