The Quakers use the old, familiar form in addressing one another. I've always understood that Thou = You (subject), Thee = you (direct and indirect object and object of preposition), Thy = your (possessive adjective), and Thine = possessive pronoun. This movie has no examples of Thou, always using Thee. Any ideas why? Am I wrong in my understanding?
Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what the Hell happened!
It's a common mistake in films and television. I would chalk it up to basic ignorance of the laws of grammar.
shareIt's not a mistake. The Quakers actually use(d) it in this manner.
"Thee" as a subject is no more "ungrammatical" than is "you" as subject (the actual subject form is/was "ye") and nobody seems to have a problem with that :)
Apparently that's how the Quakers actually used it. The conjugations of thou had pretty much disappeared, and only thee remained....a parallel nowadays would be the way people say Me and him went to the store.
share"Thou" is formal and archaic, "thee" is the common parlance. Both mean "you". Thou is not the plural form of thee. My Quaker family still uses the Plain language to each other.
shareNothing to do with formality. Thou is simply the nominative case of thee, just like I is the nominative case of me.
I/me/my
Thou/thee/thy
You/you/your
He/him/his
We/us/our
etc.
I had closed captioning on and noticed some contractions, "thee'll;" wonder if the actors actually said those lines, if so if that was correct, or if the captioner made that up.
shareFriends used "thee" for a very deliberate reason. Addressing a single person as "you" is an honorific. It is a fundamental tenant of Quaker thinking that everyone is equal. Quakers could be disowned for addressing a judge as "Your Honor." Quakers were not allowed to "suck up" to authorities. They were supposed to treat everyone with the same honor and respect as a judge or governor.
Also, "thee" is used because that's the word used in the Bible. It's called Plain Speech and it goes along with Plain Dress. No singing or guady clothing or other worldly vanities.
Anyhow, the Jessie Birdwell character is patterned after Joshua Vickers Milhous who was Jessamyn West's great-grandfather. He is also my second-cousin four-times-removed.
I grew up in a plain meeting exactly as depicted. In 1954 I asked my 6th grade teacher why we didn't say, "How art thou? (we said how is thee)." Teacher Ruth Harvey answered, "That's obsolete. We stopped using thou before the civil war." J. West (from whose novel the script was written) was on the set every day to insure authenticity. Only the non-Quaker organ salesman said thou. West heard plain language from her grandmother. The Friends meeting in the film is unprogrammed orthodox, which today is called "conservative." Later, most of these meetings in Indiana adopted the Methodist style of worship and abandoned plain dress and speech. Today (2014) Keystone Friends in Lancaster County, PA resembles what is seen in this movie. Buckaroo is entirely correct.
The 'thee' instead of 'thou' has been used in the English countryside since before Columbus set sail! You can check that in the two-volume Oxford English dictionary. If you read the ancient Book of Sufferings, you will see that some of the very first generation of Friends also used thee instead of thou. Here in England one can still hear older country folk in the western counties using 'thee' (not 'thou'), sometimes shortened to " 'ee".
Saying "all of thee" is a long-standing joke among plain-speaking Friends. Members of Ohio Yearly Meeting (conservative) still use the plain speech, including 'thee', but never 'thou.'
I am watching Friendly Persuasion now, and to me, it sounds ungrammatical. I grew up with the 1957 LCA hymnal, which used thee, thou, thy and thine as you say. My older Quaker friends who use Plain Speech still use thou and thy. The usage is similar to German, as far as I can tell.