English has a singular first person pronoun, *thou*. It has fallen out of use ex...

		kazinator on Jan 31, 2023 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Japanese explained to programmers English has a singular first person pronoun, thou. It has fallen out of use except in religious texts and ironic writing which seeks a religious tone. It's a cognate of the German du, Latin and French tu, Slovak and Czech ty and others. Some languages do fine without plurals at all. The ambiguity in you isn't just between plural and singular, but between a rhetorical you and actual. You should eat your vegetables. Who, me in particular? Or everyone?

English has that too ("one should eat one's vegetables") but it has similar problems to "thou" in that nobody uses it in everyday speech.