On the Joys of Thou and Thee

 In the last few weeks, one of the other non-native speakers who has taken his turn in leading the crowd at Lourdes for the English-language rosary is from a country I cannot quite identify. He is obviously European, and is accent is pretty good. A first I thought he was Irish, but then he gave himself away with a few mistakes. Notably he almost always says "blessed art thou among woman." A native speaker would never get the plural wrong that way.

Today I noticed that he was jumping back and forth between the two forms of the English second-person. He would (correctly) begin by addressing the Holy Mother using the archaic familiar thou, but in the next line he would switch to "and blessed is the fruit of your womb..."

Personally it is one of the joys of recitation of the rosary in English that I get to address Mary using the archaic singular second-person thou, which has mostly disappeared from everyday English. The archaic thou always indicates that one is addressing one individual, not many, and that this person is familiar enough to you as a friend or family member.

Most of the other European languages still preserve this distinction in their pronouns, so speakers of those languages would have little trouble understanding why one would use thou in English in the Ave Maria prayer to address Mary. Yet I still find it admirably that they invariably bother to use the archaic from. To me, to hear it recited with you seems unnatural, as if I am putting unnecessary distance between myself as the Blessed Mother. It is too formal.

In some of the languages which still actively preserve the thou-you pronoun distinction, one uses the familiar (thou) form in the Ave Maria. In German one addresses her as du. In Italian, one addresses her as tu; in Spanish, tú; in Polish ty; in Latin tu. In Greek, where Maria is called theotokos (the "God-bearer"), one uses the familiar pronoun form too to address her.

Yet in a few others, one addresses Maria more formally. In Portuguese, one uses vós, which is archaic in Portuguese and was formerly only used for multiple individuals. Today it is an old-fashioned way to refer to multiple people, or to one individual in a formal sense.  So it feels archaic to the Portuguese ear, but also is deferential. Portuguese has many different ways of saying "thou/you". The use of vós is probably heard by most speakers of Portuguese only in prayers or in the mass.

In French, one addresses Maria using vous, which is not archaic at all but is strictly a formal address to another person, meant to indicate respect or politeness. Unlike Portuguese, where the pronoun situation is quite messy, in French it is very clear the distinction between the familiar/singular and the formal plural. 

I've spent quite a bit of time reflecting on this. Why does French address the Blessed Mother deferentially like this, whereas in Spanish and German, and other languages, one uses the equivalent of thou, addressing Mary like a family member?

I want to make something out of it, but I can only guess at the linguistic aspects of this and how it relates to French culture. In a lot of ways, French culture is still a big mystery to me. I have learned to take things in France as they are, without trying to make big conclusions about what they mean.