Thou Thee Thine

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'I just don't know enough words,' said the bridegroom, wretchedly. The bride put her hand on his arm.

'Let's try "thee" and "thou" in English,' she suggested.

''That's not a bad idea,' he said. 'Well, all right. Now thee has ---'

'Hath,' she corrected.

'Thee hath certain --- ah ---'

'Differences,' she supplied. 'But isn't it "thou hath" --- or is it "thee hath"?'

'To hell with it!' cried her husband. 'In all thy life hast never been around, for Pete's sake?'

'Certainly, and thou --- you have no right to talk to me like that!'

.......From Thurber & White: Is Sex Necessary?

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In our school days in the 1950s we had to mug up all those cute words like:

Thou, Thy, Thee, Thine, Hath, Art, Dost, Shalt, Ye.....

I loved them...they were a change from the routine modern English.

The earliest I met with such words was in Gandhi's favorite hymn:

Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home,--
Lead thou me on!
Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene,--one step enough for me.

It appeared to me to be preposterous to replace that 'Lead thou me on!' by its modern equivalent, 'Lead you me on!'

We had lots of prose pieces and poems from the Holy Bible...Psalms, Ten Commandments and Genesis:

And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?

And all our Biblical excerpts were from the Authorized Version of King James (1611). And they were truly musical. 

Take the Ten Commandments that God revealed to Moses. No doubt the original was in Hebrew. But the AV translation has as many as 8 or 9 starting from:

"Thou shalt not..."

 


  http://biblescripture.net/Commandments.html 


It would be scurrilous to translate:

"Thou shalt not kill"

into the Modern American slang:

"Don't kill, damn you!"

But it is not as bad as that but the New American Standard Bible Version has it as:

"You shall not murder"

Unfortunately I had lost my Father's  Holy Bible which he got as a gift in his Convocation of the Madras Christian College, a butter-papered gilt-edged thin beauty. So, around 2000, I asked Edwin to gift me a copy of the Holy Bible (in exchange for my own hand-written booklet of excerpts from the Principal Upanishads). He didn't want to delay and so he sent me his own lovely but huge copy of the latest American Version. I did read some of it but not with pleasure....there were no Thous and Thees like:

17: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

 The NASV has it as:

 ¹⁷ but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not ^[n]eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.

which, as you know, is not quite the same thing.

My sister, in her Class IX had the lovely poem, Battle of Blenheim. And it has the lines:

"It was the English," Kaspar cried,

"Who put the French to rout;

But what they fought each other for

I could not well make out;

But everybody said," quoth he,

"That 'twas a famous victory.

When their teacher came to the phrase, 'quoth he', the whole class burst into laughter; and my sister was quoting that phrase a dozen times at home and laughing in her sleeves. In the earlier two stanzas, Southey wrote, 'said he', but perhaps the rhythm demanded it to be replaced by 'quoth he'. It so happens that the sound of 'quoth he' is precisely the same as, 'monkey' in Telugu (kothi).

Even our Nirda-babu chose the title: "Thy Hand, Great Anarch!" for the sequel to his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, as late as 1987. It is taken from Alexander Pope's Dunciad:

Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
And unawares Morality expires.
Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread empire Chaos! is restored:
Light dies before thy uncreating word;
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall,
And universal darkness buries all.

When it comes to translating the Upanishadic Mahavakya: "Tattvamasi" people choose to render it as: "That Thou Art!" and not: "You are that".

Talking of Hebrew, the first slim edition of Goldstien's Classical Mechanics has his Preface ending in a Hebrew quote written in Hebrew script. Of course I could never make it out. That's perhaps the only time when a modern Physics book has Hebrew script.

And then we had, in our college, many books with footnotes in Latinized words like: ibid, circa, sic, whose meanings we could only guess. And we had a 2-year course on General education that had Biology in it. And we were introduced to the Latin binomial nomenclature consisting of a 'generic' followed by a 'specific' that we just loved...like Panthera Tigris Corbetti:







  http://www.felinest.com/felidae-family-tigers/


Even our college teachers were flummoxed when it came to translating the famous Julius Caesar's last words:

"Et tu Brute? Then Fall Caesar"

Translations ranged from: "You too Brute?" to "Big Brute Brutus?"

The correct rendition: "And thou Brutus?" we learned much later when we knew 'et' from 'etc' and 'et al'.

I have a weakness for coining (not very originally, as it turned out) my own Latin words like, 'Verbivores' and 'Bibliophobes', not to speak of 'Allergica Teacheralis'.

All our Puja, Wedding, and Funeral mantras are happily in Sanskrit which most of us don't understand. Like our wedding vows:

Dharmecha, ardhecha, kamecha, mokshecha…Nathi charami, nathi charami, nathi charami…

It is good we don't know their meanings since they are mostly observed in the breach.

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