"You are", "He is", "They are"

Question

I thought I had "is" vs "are" figured out since the 1st grade (if not earlier), however, I recently was thinking of the awkward sounding line from "Porgy And Bess", "Porgy, you is my man".  I wouldn't think of saying "you is", but,  "you" is a singular subject.  So why do we say "You are" as we would say "They are"?

BarbaraPA · Accepted Answer

The characters in that show use non-standard English.

The verb "to be" is irregular, but in most verbs, only the third-person singular is different. The from used with "you" is often the form used with "I" or "we" or "they."

Blue Jay · Answer

At one time English verbs had different endings for the I/you/he/we/they forms, as is still the case for many other languages, such as French and Spanish. In English this is no longer the case for most verbs, which (in the present tense) only add an "s" to the stem for the 3rd person singular. To be is an exception. One theory holds that there is an advantage to having distinct forms of a word for different uses, for clarity; while at the same time it is useful to have fewer distinct forms, for simplicity. According to this theory, simplicity largely won out in English, but in the case of to be, as the most frequently used verb, clarity trumped simplicity. Since it is used so much, native speakers have little trouble remembering all the parts of the verb.
The other interesting thing about to be is the variety of unrelated forms within it. The infinitive is to be, and be appears in being, will be and have/has/had been. The present has am, is and are, while the past tense uses was and were. This is because the verb is a mixture of three different Old English verbs, beon, wesan and eam. In Old English wesan and eam merged, with eam supplying the present tense and wesan the past tense. Later on, beon joined forces with eam/wesan to give us our irregular, and confusing, verb to be.

CalifJim · Answer

AnonymousSo why do we say "You are" as we would say "They are"?

Historically, we had something like this:

Singular ... Plural
I am ........ we are
thou art ... you are
he is ........they are

But 'you are' was used even for one person because it was regarded as more polite and formal. (I'm not sure why people thought that.) Eventually everybody made that substitution all the time, so 'thou art' dropped out of use completely, like this:

I am ........ we are
~~thou art ... you are~~
you are ... you are
he is ........they are

CJ

"You are", "He is", "They are"

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