kate | (Reply)

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I don’t know of any! But yeah thee/you operated just about exactly like tu/vous but circa the Renaissance thru Enlightenment “thee” dropped abruptly (as language development goes) out of fashion.

There’s some potential links to the growth of cities and lash back against the idea that those of “higher” social standing were allowed to refer to you in a way that established in their very language that you were their inferior, so that the use of “thee” outside of really personally intimate relationships became construed as an automatic insult - thus it surviving in love poem format (“shall I compare thee to a summers day”) and in reference to/from God much longer than in general usage - and as it wasn’t in COMMON usage it dropped off entirely....

.... until ironically it was viewed as archaic and because we then got the idea that “archaic” = “formal” people get the idea we dropped our POLITE second person when it’s exactly the opposite.