"Thou shalt not pass" and "You shall not pass" hybrid
Is it technically incorrect grammar to make a hybrid of the well known statements: "Thou shalt not pass" and "You shall not pass"––this hybrid being: "You shalt not pass"?
From what I understand from not 100% trustworthy sources (Wikipedia), "Thou shalt not" is used by the KJV (Ten Commandments, etc.) and is Shakespearean English, whereas "Thou shall not" is the modern equivalent.
My question is (a) if the hybrid statement is grammatically correct, and (b) if "Thou shall not" truly is the grammatically correct equivalent of "Thou shalt not".
“You shalt” is not ‘correct’, nor is “Thou shall not”
Putting aside the question of whether conjugation of verbs is a technically a grammatical rule or has some other status, in English, like many other languages, different pronouns call for different verb forms, and mixing them up often produces jarring and unnatural-sounding sentences that most would not consider correct.
For instance the verb 'to be' conjugates as follows in the present indicative:
- I am
- Thou art (obsolete in modern English and replaced by 'you' form)
- He/She/It is
- We are
- You are
- They are
These are sometimes referred to as the first, second, and third person singular and plural forms respectively.
Most verbs now only have two forms in the present tense: the form which is the same as the infinitive, and a he/she/it form (3rd person singular) which has an -s or -es on the end: work/works, pass/passes. A few verbs only have the one form (e.g. can).
However, when the 'thou' pronoun was in common use, many verbs also had a 'thou' form ending in -t, -st, or -est: e.g. shalt, wilt, canst.
Over time the 'you' form supplanted 'thou', and the 'thou' forms also all disappeared. They are recognised largely because they feature in older texts such as the KJV.