thee + taketh

[Ducklet Cat]

1- Thee means you in poetry.
What are other such forms that are only used in poetry?

I guess there is thi or something like that?




2- In Yahoo Mail its says "Spammers Giveth, Yahoo Spamguard Takthes ways"
What does that th signify?
and is it pronounced as "the" or as "th" as in teeth?


Thanks :)

[Tdol]

It's an old form of 'you', a familar form- thou/thee/thine are the forms. The -eth ending is pronounced (=ith), so 'giveth' has two syllables.

[MrPedantic]

You sometimes find the obsolete 3rd person singular ending (-eth or -'th, i.e. "he cometh" = "he comes") in jocular English.

In this instance, there's a reference to a well-known phrase: "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away".

In some early writers, such as Chaucer, you also find "-eth" as an ending for the imperative (e.g. "Taketh!" = "Take!"). But this is never used in jocular English.

MrP

[BobK]

Note for linguistic geeks:
[quoted from April McMahon in Mugglestone ed. Oxford History of the English Language, 2006]

[T]he originally northern third person singular ending -(e)s spread ... to the south during the early modern English period [16th and 17th centuries]....

She goes on to say that the -eth ending has been shown, by corpus data, to have been slower to die out following a verb with a sibilant ending - increaseth, dismisseth etc. But for much of the period both -s and -th endings could co-exist even in a single document.
b

[Ducklet Cat]

Many thanks everybody!