Ye, thee, and thou -- also good stuff!

Following up on my last post about how the less-familiar adverbs and pronouns of the KJV are actually good for you…let me add that from its very beginnings 400 years ago, the KJV was meant to be somewhat old-fashioned and classic. Its language and syntax were not always grounded in the spoken language of the day, and were instead a bit more literary. We see this in the way that the translators usually steered away from “you” for the 2nd person pronoun, using “ye” instead for the plural, and “thee” and “thou” in the singular. These had become fairly uncommon as pronouns by 1600; so “ye,” “thee,” and “thou” carried a bit of literary flair and lent more music to the KJV than was present in the earliest English vernacular Bibles. For these reasons, some scholars have called the KJV “a deliberate piece of social and linguistic engineering.” (The Bible: Authorized King James Version, Introduction and Notes by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008; xxviii.)