Thou, I and We An Analysis of Pronouns

Joannes Richter Destroying Troy describes the creation of a world from pronouns, which as an idea obviously may have been inspiring the linguistic design. Why are these pronouns so important? Of course the Swadesh lists suggest the three English pronouns I, You and We (in the listed order) are the most prominent and important words of any language. And if a creation legend has been founded on words the story would have to use these pronouns as a foundation. Studying the runes' scriptures we may identify the vowels U and I as the most important symbols for the ancient runes.

Runes
The Runes-dictionary1 lists the three most important words for the English pronouns I, You and We as follows: JAK respectively. Ik I (isl. ek, schw. jag, dn. jeg, goth. ik, ahd. ih, ags. ic, engl. i, nhd. ich), the derivation seems to be unclear. U ( Du, engl. Thou) UIR represents the runes' word we.

The Roman Sky-God IU-pitter

The Roman Sky-God2 Iuppiter originated as a vocative compound of the Old Latin vocative *Iou and pater ("father") and came to replace the Old Latin nominative case *Ious. Linguistic studies identify the form *Iou-pater as deriving from the Indo-European vocative compound *Dyu-pter (meaning "O Father Sky-god"; nominative: *Dyus-ptr). The vowels U, O and I may be identified as the most important symbols for the name of this skygod.

The Hittite sky-god iu3

Initially the Hittite kings venerated the Indo-European sky-god iu (Greek Zeus, Latin Iu(piter)). U and I may be identified as the most important symbols for the name of this sky-god iu as well. His name was written by means of 2 ideograms of Babylonian origin, carrying the letters U, and I M. The reading of the ideogram in the Luvian language was Dattas and the Hurrites called him Teshub (Storm God)4.

1 von Udo Waldemar Dieterich (1844) 2 ^ "Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans". American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 2000. Retrieved 2008-09-27. 3 Hittite Gods from A Dictionary of Ancient Near Eastern Mythology 4 Source: page 88 in Patterns in comparative religion - Mircea Eliade (1958)

The Pronouns of the Alpine population

The majority of the Alpine population uses the pronouns IEU, IOU or IAU for their Ego-pronouns 5, which seem to prefer vowels for their design. The personal pronouns for the second person singular usually follow the runes pattern thu or thou. Samples for the Alpine Ego-pronouns are iu m, m iu6, to be used along with Diu (God) in the west Alps, the Ego-pronoun ieu along with Dieu (God) in the Provence and the Ego-pronoun jau in the Jauer-area.

The characters I and U in the Tetragrammaton YHVH

In the Tetragrammaton YHVH the matres lectionis (Latin "mothers of reading") allow us to interpret the characters Y as the vowel I and the character V as a vowel U which identifies the vowels U and I as the most important symbols for the name of this deity.

The pronoun we in Old High German

The pronoun we in Old High German may be identified as uuir in the St Gall Paternoster7: Fater unseer, thu pist in himile, uuihi namun dinan, qhueme rihhi diin, uuerde uuillo diin, so in himile sosa in erdu. prooth unseer emezzihic kip uns hiutu, oblaz uns sculdi unsero, so uuir oblazem uns skuldikem, enti ni unsih firleiti in khorunka, uzzer losi unsih fona ubile.

Conclusion
The vowels U and I (and probably to a lesser level the other vowels A, E, O) may have been playing an important role in the linguistic design. In English the vowels I and U (you) may still represent both the Ego- and the Thou-pronoun, which are the most important words in English. Originally the we-pronoun had been designed as a UIR-runes combination, later evolving to UUI(R), by applying a double-U as a header character. IU-combinations have been identified in most names for important sky-gods (Iupitter, iu, Diou, Dieu, IHVH), in the Ego-Pronomina (ieu, iou, iau), in the we-pronoun UUI(R), but seldom in the Thou-pronoun. Originally the symbolism for the I and U-characters probably referred to the creation legend for an androgynous Adam Kadmon as a man, which had to be split up into a male character (represented by an I-symbol) and a female character (represented by a U-symbol). Their Creator ordered them to rejoin to a matrimonial couple to form a divine image (symbolized by the UI-combination)8.

5 Personal pronoun for the 1st person singular 6 Patois of Villar-St-Pancrace : Personal pronouns: Cas sujet Cas rgime atone tonique direct indirect Sg. 1p a (l) iu m, m iu 2p t, t t, t t 3p M u(l), al ei(l) s lu ei F eilo la eilo N o, ul, la - lu - Pl. 1p n* n* 2p * v* v* 3p M (z) s l* i F eil (eilaz) l* eil 7 Quelle: Braune/Ebbinghaus, Althochdeutsches Lesebuch, 17th edn (Niemeyer, 1994) in Wikipedia Old High German 8 The Hermetic Codex