Why is it You were and not You was?

You "ARE" both for singular and plural.

Hi Timbo,

nice to meet you - haven't talked to you yet, have I?

Where in Australia are you from?
As I can see, your e-mail address is not an Australian one - do you live in Switzerland at the moment?

I was wondering you knew about the German forms, so do you learn German?
Actually, we have three forms for English "you":
"du" (2nd person singular),
"ihr" (2nd person plural) and
"Sie" (formal 2nd person, both singular and plural).


I posted a long reply already to a similar question about the forms of to be in a former thread, I searched for it, but unfortunately I haven't been able to find it yet - maybe the admins could post a link to where it has gone to now??!!


Maybe I can give a short answer nevertheless, I hope I can remember all the important facts...

Language tends to become simpler, i.e. irregularities are reduced.
This development is a very slow one of course, and the more common a word is, i.e. the more it is used in daily conversation, the harder it is to get rid of the irregularities.
You can see that especially in inflections of words.
Strong verbs e.g. tend to become weak ones as that is a more productive way of "building" forms of the tenses
(learn - learnt - learnt e.g. becomes learned - learned, and work - wrought - wrought changed to worked - worked).

It's a bit more difficult with was/were as I have to refer to Middle-High-English and Middle-High-German now, ok let's have a try:
You maybe know that English and German both are Germanic languages, therefore they are related of course.


English however, is usually a step further already in its way of dropping irregularities, while German is not, but the word "to be" bears some difficulties: Due to the fact that it is a verb that is used very often, the forms hardly change; you could say "to be" is sort of a "fossil verb".


The past tense forms of "to be" in Middle-High-German were

ich was (current German: ich war) = I was
du waere (cG: du warst) = you were
er was (cG: er war) = he was

wir waren (cG: wir waren) = we were
ir wart (cG: ihr wart) = you were
si waren (cG: sie waren) = they were


You can see now, that the forms of current German are more regular than they were in Middle-High-German:
The -s in 1st and 3rd person has been replaced by -r, that consonant that occurs in the plural.
The form for 2nd person singular had been derived from the plural forms of the past tense, and, if possible, with Umlaut, this Umlaut has been replaced by the stem -a- in a later step of simplifying.



English on the other hand still keeps this old -s in the 1st and 3rd person plural: I/he "was".

It is a bit more difficult with the form of the 2nd person singular and plural:

Some of you were quite on the right way already:
Actually, the old form of "you" for 2nd person singular was "thou", for 2nd person plural "you" - so there was a difference in former times between singular and plural (as there still is in German).

The form of "to be" for 2nd person singular was "thou wert" - compare with: "thou didst, thou hadst", etc. - as you can see: these old forms also kept the old inflection ending "-(s)t"; also compare to the German forms above.

There has been another form for "thou wert", later on which used to be "thou wast", here you can see that the old Umlaut had been eliminated and the -r has been replaced by -s to have a difference between singular and plural forms.

In a further step then finally, the difference between the singular and plural form of the 2nd person had been dropped and the singular person had totally been replaced by the plural form: "you", for both singular and plural, so that is why the current form is "you were" rather than "you was".

If you compare these forms in one more step now with the Dutch forms of "to be" (past tense), you can see, that here, the form was indeed replaced by the singular, more regular form - the old s/r change is still kept though:

ik was
jij was
hij was

wij waren
jullie waren
zij waren



I hope I could help you out and this was not too confusing for you.
Maybe one of the admins will find my former posting reply about the "to be" problem, it might be a better help.

Greetings from Germany
Pemmican

Hi Pemmican and Timbo.

Pemmican, I had a look for the posting you mentioned. I found many interesting postings of yours during my search, so many in fact that I was not able to decide which posting you were referring to (but all were very, very interesting).

One of these days (if you don't mind) I may get around to collecting similar postings of yours together in one place for easier reference.

Cheers,
Mike

Hi Mike,

I can't be here as often as I'd like to, but WHEN I am, it seems that I write a lot of stuff *lol*

Collecting all my posts? Sure, if you want to - but tell me first before you're going to publish it! *hehehe*
There is a lot that could be written about these topics, you could even write books about it - so I try to summarize it as short as possible, but still my answers turn out to be way too long I'm afraid...


I already thought about pinning up some posts for easier reference as there are questions very often that have been answered a couple of times already, what do you think?

It was nice to hear from you again, as I haven't seen you for ages, I hope you're doing fine!

Timbo, I sent you an e-mail, I hope you got it.

Bye for now
Pemmican

Just wanted to say that I'll be in Holland for the rest of the week, so if anyone e-mails me, I won't be able to answer before next week... but then I will

Een prettige dag, tot ziens!!

Pemmican