@wallacewords
Prepare for useless-trivia-dumping!

"You" in English has a somewhat complicated history. In Old English, there were actually three forms of the second person pronouns: a singular, a plural, and a dual form. The dual form died out by about the 12th Century, leaving Middle English with just a singular and a plural. But the word that went on to become "you" was actually the plural form in the dative case. The plural nominative was "ye," which you may recognize as occurring in older modern English.

"Ye" was contrasted with "thou" in early modern English, "thou" being the singular. You'll see that mostly in Shakespeare and the Bible. "Thee" is the accusative form of "thou," and there's some fancy footwork with verbs of a certain sort which leads to, "Thou shalt not..." etc.

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@wallacewords
This is all complicated by the fact that not only does English do a plural and singular "you" but we also used to do a formal and informal one. "Thou" was informal. "Ye" was more formal. But those aren't hard and fast rules.

This is further complicated by certain people's refusal to use the formal "you" with anyone for religious reasons. Thus, Quakers used "thee" for everything. Some other sects did likewise, though some used "thou/thee" more grammatically.

All of this is further further complicated by the fact that the "th" sound in English used to be represented by "þ" the thorn. However, in some handwritten scripts the thorn looked very much like a "y," so with the advent of the printing press a lot of printers used "y" to represent "þ." So "thee" could be printed as "yee."

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@wallacewords
To make matters completely ridiculous, the article "the" was also originally written with a thorn, printed incorrectly, and thus, "ye olde shoppe" competed with "ye art fine gentlemen" until at a certain point English said, "Fuck it!" and changed "ye" to "you," probably because it looked like "thou."

Then "thou" died out almost everywhere except the pulpit, likely because English stopped caring about the difference between formal and informal and we just used "you" to be safe. Plus English stopped caring much about a lot of noun cases. Basically English gave up on grammar.

But you can still see the vestiges of "you" being plural when you conjugate verbs. "I am, you are, he/she/it is, we are, you are, they are." "You" uses the plural form of verbs.

So really, we have a perfectly adequate plural "you:" "you." We lack a good singular "you" since we lost "thou," unless you speak one of the dialects that preserve it.

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