Since ‘chi’ has been introduced as the ‘formal’ form for ‘you’, it has never been made clear whether ‘you’ in the English is to be expressed as ‘ti’ or ‘chi’. You know very well that these forms have to be distinguished in Welsh, as in many other languages. Can you find a way of indicating to learners which form of ‘you’ you are expecting, rather than simply leaving this up to the learner?
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In the Old Course, for the first couple of levels, they used ‘you all’ for ‘chi’, which worked well enough for the learner.
But that didn’t included the ‘singular of respect’ usage which is why I suppose it was dropped.
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It might be quite amusing to go archaic and distinguish the singular by saying thou and thee.
It would work in Yorkshire?
I have no more practical solution, sorry.
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I have genuinely used “thou” when, checking something with Google translate and it defaulted to using chi in its answer, I wanted to force it to use ti instead.
People might think it odd/silly at first, but honestly it would work and you’d get used to it pretty quickly I think. And as a side benefit we’d be - in a very, very minor way - supporting the survival of one feature of minority English dialects.
So, if SSi actually did adopt using thou/thee, I would support it. 
I’ve spent a lot of time learning Welsh with Dysgu Cymraeg, and I really wish their courses gave more attention to chi/ti distinctions. Not the grammar – the social context. My impression is that people not brought up with it (or du/Sie, tu/vous etc.), underestimate the difficulty.
Little mini-roleplays should be threaded through the levels. So you’re in situation x – do you ti/chi? (Smug north Welsh speakers here say neither, they chdi. 
)
But it could all add up so that when you’re talking to a native speaker, you can feel confident picking a pronoun without thought of giving offence.
For people who haven’t grown up with it, and for people like me who are anxious and neuro-divergent, it feels like a huge burden.
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Do people still use thou/thee in Yorkshire?
I remember hearing it in the 1969 film A Kestrel for A Knave, but I have a feeling that since the sixties it may have eroded down to a handful of elderly people.
Hope I’m wrong!
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I remember that in the challenges, the english prompt would explicitly say “you (plural)”, which kind of works, but let’s look at it this way: you know the difference between ti and chi, and in a real-life situation, you would also know which form to use to address the person(s) in front of you.
So if you say the “wrong” form of you in Welsh during the pause, don’t worry about it, as long as you say something in Welsh at all 
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So far as I know it’s becoming steadily less common but some younger people do still use it.
I sympathise with your feelings of uncertainty/anxiety. My instinct is definitely to default towards more formal speech until given clear signs otherwise.
In simplest terms, you’d think being more polite at least means you’ll never offend… but nothing is truly that simple. It can seem unfriendly or snobbish, sometimes.
One piece of advice is to match what the other person uses. But I can imagine that wouldn’t always work. For example, there’s an occasionally quoted Yorkshire phrase (I should add here that I’m not from Yorkshire I just know all sorts of random trivia) that goes something like “Don’t thou ‘thou’ me! I’m ‘you’ to thee!” from an adult to a child who is not being sufficiently respectful.
If I’m speaking to people obviously senior to myself / in positions of authority, I ought to address them as chi. But might they possibly address me as ti? Or is Welsh more “balanced” in this regard, that either both people are being formal and using chi, or not?
You can’t actually use ‘thou’ for ‘chi’, though, as strictly speaking, it’s the first person singular, not plural.
People used to use Thou/Thee for God, but other European languages like French also use the second person singular (Tu) for that. The old English plural was ‘ye’ (informal) and ‘you’ (formal).
There’s an interesting (well, to me, at least) article on how thou evolved and disappeared on Wikipedia: Thou - Wikipedia.
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This is a (tongue in cheek) flowchart showing how to solve the equivalant problem in French. Sorry, I don’t know who to credit for this, but they did a great job. Chapeau…
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No, no, you misunderstood. When Google gives me a chi answer and that’s not what I want, I replace my "you"s with "thou"s and "thee"s to force it to use ti.
I know very well that thou is singular and familiar, no “strictly speaking” about it.
My half-serious suggestion was that instead of finding imperfect ways to indicate when chi is wanted (“y’all”, “you, sir”?) we instead utilise a feature of English which does still exist, though neglected, and exclusively use thou/thee to indicate when ti/chdi is wanted. It’s archaic in most dialects, but it maps exactly.
Not quite with ye being informal and you formal. It was actually just subject and object.
Ye see me. I see you.
Thou sees me. I see thee.
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I love that chart. 
Does it work entirely the same way in Welsh though?
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I did indeed – my apologies – though I did think it was Google being wrong, not thou…
Have you read Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls? He uses thou and thee to replicate the Spanish. Mind you, he also writes things like “I expletive on your mother’s expletive,” which is why I couldn’t finish the story. I didn’t think the technique worked at all.
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No idea, but the chart brought back happy memories of being an English Assistant near Chambery in 1979 and having to navigate the minefield.
The easy answer is to vouvoyer everybody until you’re sure. As the saying goes: Chacun a son vous
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That Wiki article reckons that ‘ye’ and ‘you’ were both plural subject case (one informal, one formal), while ‘you’ being the only object – at least before the Restoration. How long that persisted, I don’t know.
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Honestly, that sounds like something I can live without. Still, it’s interesting.
Tolkien used thou a handful of times in The Lord of the Rings to make particular points regarding formality or closeness. It wasn’t consistent though, just a few moments where the distinction held particular relevance.
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Huh. Well, learn something new every day. 
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Yes – Tolkien is deliberately writing a story set in a remote heroic age: it fits. I didn’t think it did in the Hemingway.
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Well, I could have been clearer perhaps.
Sometimes Google really is thick, and even when I’ve written thou it still comes back with chi. I have to give up then.
Google isn’t reliable, but sometimes it is a quick convenient way to check things. Provided that what it says is at least somewhat similar to what I expected, it can be of use, up to a point.
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