of level of familiarity. Old English used in the second-person singular for both formal and informal contexts. Following the Norman Conquest, the Middle English that emerged continued to use at first, but by the 13th century, Norman French influence had led to the use of the second-person plural or in formal contexts. In Early Modern English superiors and strangers were therefore respectfully addressed as ye in the nominative and you in the objective; thou and thee were used for familiars and subordinates. The more widespread and observed this division became, the more pejorative it became to strangers to be called by the familiar form of address. By the 17th century, such a use among the nobility was strongly and deliberately contemptuous, as in the declamation of the prosecutor at Sir Walter Raleigh's 1603 trial "I thou thee, thou traitor!" Accordingly, the use of thou began to decline and it was effectively extinct in the everyday speech of most English dialects by the early 18th century, supplanted by the polite you, even when addressing children and animals, something also seen in Dutch and Latin America (most of Brazil and parts of Costa Rica and Colombia). Meanwhile, as part of English's continuing development away from its synthetic origins since the influx of French vocabulary following the Norman invasion, you had been replacing ye since the 15th century. Standard English was left with a single second-person pronoun for all cases, numbers and contexts and largely incapable of maintaining a T–V distinction. Notwithstanding all of this, the translators of the King James Version of the Bible chose to employ the older forms in their work (1604–1611) in order to convey the grammatical distinctions made by their Hebrew, Greek and Latin sources. Its subsequent popularity and the religious rationale of many who continued to employ thou has preserved its use in English, but made it seem pious and ironically more formal and respectful than the everyday you. In the United States, some Protestant sects, such as the Quakers and Mormons insisted on addressing everyone as thou, because they considered every person to be a friend and an equal. This persisted until the 19th or early 20th century. Frisian (West) In West Frisian, the formal singular nominative (pronounced yo) is very close to the English you and the Middle and Early Modern English . There is no such distinction in the plural; the plural second person