Listening to Mannheim Steamroller just taught me something fascinating. Having learned German, I was familiar with the concept of formal and informal pronouns, and I knew that English once used
you
and
thou
for those purposes. Rather than continue using
thou as the informal in English, however, speakers of the language began using
you, which had, until that time, been a formal pronoun, exclusively. Presumably this was some kind of act of egalitarianism--in any case, the result is that modern English speakers tend to think of
thou as stilted and formal when it is, in fact, the opposite. Tonight I was playing around on
Amazon in an attempt to make some kind of Christmas wishlist when I realized that a Mannheim Steamroller song entitled
Herbei, O Ihr Gläubigen (O Come All Ye Faithful) was playing on my computer. Curious to see the German lyrics since I couldn't understand the choir on its own, I googled for the title and found
some lyrics. As I read the side-by-side comparison of the lyrics in German and English, it occurred to me that the familiar English version's fourth verse uses the informal when referring to Jesus Christ:
Yea, Lord, we greet Thee, Born this happy morning, Jesus, to Thee be all glory giv'n! Word of the Father, Now in the flesh appearing!
Although I knew that
thee was informal, I'd never thought about its use in hymns and Biblical texts. The bells really went off in my head when I realized that the German version of the song (
which is quite likely where the English text comes from, knowing hymns scrap that, Wikipedia says that
the Latin version is the original)
also uses the informal. Given my limited knowledge of Catholicism, it would probably have been considered a major no-no to refer to God or Jesus in the informal during the time period when most of these sorts of hymns were written, so I wondered if using informal pronouns for God was a Protestant innovation, perhaps intended to make individuals feel closer to God. Once again, Wikipedia comes to the rescue:
As William Tyndale translated the Bible into English in the early 1500s, he sought to preserve the singular and plural distinctions he found in his Hebrew and Greek originals. Therefore, he consistently used thou for the singular and ye for the plural regardless of the relative status of the speaker and the addressee. By doing so, he probably saved thou from utter obscurity, and gave it an air of solemnity that sharply distinguished it from its French counterpart. Tyndale's usage was imitated in the King James Bible, and remained familiar because of that translation.
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In other words, because
ye/you was originally plural and
thou was originally singular, God and Jesus have been translated into English in the informal since they are also singular. That explains the English, I suppose, but is German the same way for the same reason? It seems to me that, since German retains rules for informal and formal pronouns, that they might be a bit pickier about shoving
Du onto God. Or maybe my professors have made a bigger deal about that distinction than anyone does in real life...