Why do we say "You are welcome" (for example) when talking to one person. Shouldn't it be "You is welcome" for one person and "Your are welcome" for more than one?
Top answer
No
— Fivejedjon
No
Free · every Monday
Get the Weekly English Kit 📬
New words, one handy idiom, and a 2-minute quiz — delivered to your inbox to keep your streak alive.
I understand your question, and you are right; it is weird. I think the origin of "you ARE" (even though you're talking to a single person) is politeness. For some reason, speaking to a person using words for many people was polite. In French, there is a singular 'you' and a plural 'you'. When talking to a stranger, people use the plural 'you', because it is polite. This leads me to suspect that
The word 'you' in English is a strange one, it is actually the formal reference for a person or persons, there was once another 'informal' word being Thou, so to one person you would say "Thou are", to more than one you would say "You are", we dropped the Thou many years ago but kept the structure. Also, the English language is Germanic/Norse in origin but our grammar rules are Latin and a