May I 'thou' you?

I thought that was a peculiar structure when I encountered it in Estonian, but then I stumbled across it in German and in English (albeit, not Modern English).

Seems to be the way to ask someone if you can be familiar with them - not, "may I call you thou?" but rather "may I 'thou' you"?

It took a while for the purpose of "thou" to sink into my head. In university I don't think we expressly covered the fact that "thou" was singular and "you" was plural. That "you" was the polite form, yes, but not that it was the plural form.

When I started working on Estonian I was giving myself notes in Old English, pulled from the dark recesses of my mind, to help me keep track of things. I had remembered that "eow" was plural, so I jotted it next to "teie/te" in my notes to help me remember that the "you" starting with 't' was plural in this language (I was struggling to separate it from "tu" in French).

I had really only seen the Old English versions laid out in this table from Mitchell and Robinson (1992):

Nom.	þū 'thou'	ġit 'you two'	ġē 'ye, you'
Acc.	þē, þeċ	inc	ēow
Gen.	þīn	incer	ēower
Dat.	þē	inc	ēow

While I inderstood the principles behind the Old English parts of that table, I hadn't quite cottoned onto the fact that "thou" was also in that singular column to help make sense of the "þū". I think I was just distracted by the fact that we used to have a Dual form (as well as a Singular and a Plural) for first and second person.

And, of course, because it was never expressly said in class, and I wasn't paying attention when it was written down, I missed it.

So, here I was using "eow" incorrectly (always in the Accusative/Dative case forms, when Estonian doesn't even have Accusitive or Dative cases), when I could have just been using "thou" (in its various declensions) for "sina/sa".

Like a lot of things in this whole language learning schtick, it suddenly became clear after I started learning German, and noticed that the verb conjugation for "du" was pretty dang close to the conjugation for "thou" - which lead to quite the "well, duh, why didn't I notice that before?" moment, I can tell you.

The odd thing is, I know how to conjugate verbs with a thou form, but hadn't actually noticed it was different from the you form. So many gaps in my knowledge. It's as annoying as heck.

I swear, learning another language would be so much easier if we were just taught English properly at school. Dang post-80s curriculum is too lazy. Keeps trying to keep the kids happy by only teaching the version of English we use currently - and even then it barely teaches the grammar.

I tell you, when I write my "introduction to Estonian" textbook, I'm totally going to use a full English/German comparison model that starts by reintroducing the concepts of second-person singular and cases in English. Everything makes a lot more sense in another language if you can see it working in your own, first.