"Thee must be hungry," she said, more briskly. "Come, and I'll give thee a bit to eat."
"The answer is in thy heart," she said softly. "Thee can always hear it if thee listens for it."What I wondered is whether the pronouns have been used properly in this dialogue. (Forgive me some grammar geekiness here...) I always thought "thee" was the objective case for the pronoun, "thou" was the subjective case, and "thy" was the possessive. If that's true, then a sentence might read something like this:
"Thou must be hungry...I'll give thee a bit to put in thy stomach."In an earlier draft of my novel, I had the protagonist's sister-in-law be Quaker because I thought it would contribute to a subplot about slavery that was in the story at that time (Quakers were leaders in the abolition movement). I tried to be very careful to get the dialogue right, because I thought that would be the type of mistake that would take the reader out of the story. But I never felt entirely confident that it was done correctly, and I also had the problem of trying to figure out what verb should go with "thou." ("Thou have"? "Thou has?" "Thou do"? "Thou does"? ARRRGGGH!!!)
Eventually, I decided it wasn't urgent to the plot that the character be a Quaker. That was an easy way to solve my problem, but I still wonder about it. Just what is the right way to have a Quaker character use pronouns? Just in case it is urgent to have a character be Quaker in some future story!
