Difference between thy and thine?

Question

What's the difference between thy and thine? Don't they both mean "your"?

Answer 1

Thy before an consonant. "Thy book".
Thine before a vowel. "Drink to me only with thine eyes..."
When you want to say that something is of a person, you use "thine". "This book is thine".

It's all quite simple really.

Answer 2

Just think of my and mine.

my - thy

mine - thine

The problem is that older uses (and the KJ Bible) used both 'mine' and 'thine' in places where we today would use only 'my' and, had it survived at all, 'thy'. Those uses were based on vowel/consonant, with mine/thine before vowels and my/thy before consonants. "My" and 'thy' are actually newer forms, developed in Middle English from the '-ine' forms.

ADD: Both sets of these words derived from Old English forms - back when English still had cases like Latin and German. The genitive (possessive) case of the pronoun for 'I' was 'min' and for the pronoun for 'you" it was 'thin'. These genitive forms developed into 'mine' and 'thine' and then further developed into the pairs my/mine, thy/thine in Middle English. Commonly (but not always), it was my/thy before consonants, mine/thine before vowels. About the time of transition to Modern English, this purely phonetic distribution was lost, and the '-y' form, either 'my' or 'thy', came to be used before any noun. The '-ine' forms became the stand-alone pronouns and were no longer used before nouns.

However, at roughly the same time, the whole family of original second person pronouns (thee, thou, thy, thine) was falling out of use. The net result is that using 'thy' as the only possessive before a noun was for a relatively short period as languages go, so there are relatively few literary references showing this.

Answer 3

The difference is the word that follows: - does it start with a vowel or a consonant? Its the same as the difference between 'a' and 'an' but with the meaning of 'your'.

a cat (one (any) cat)
an owl (one (any) owl)

thy cat (your cat)
thine owl (your owl)

Both are forms of the word 'thou' which relates to the the person being addressed.

Answer 4

Thy relates to yourself. Thine refers to ones belonging to you, as your family.

Answer 5

just a guess, but maybe the difference is the word that follows them and whether or not it starts with a vowel

thy nose
thine eyes

???

Answer 6

Check www.askoxford.com They may have help, but I think it has to do with singular antecedents and plural antecedents.