I want to form a sentence which says"I am yours" in a way that I replace "yours" with thy/thine, but I have no idea which one is correct. I've read that each one of these is used depending on what word comes after thy/thine, but in this case "yours" is the last word in the sentence, therefore it isn't followed by anything. I also have the same question for the sentence "I am hers". What word is going to be a proper replacement for "hers", given the fact that it is also the last word?
Learn English – Which one should I use thy/thine
grammargrammaticalityword-choice
Related Solutions
What is "so" when a sentence begins with it?
It's a discourse marker, like oh, well, now, and many others.
It can be used…
To inform the listener that something is relevant to their interest: “So, Sam was asking about you the other day…” suggests something in the air between them, like love, tension, or a bad smell.
To introduce a story, explanation, or change of topic: if I ask someone “What happened on your vacation?” and they begin with “So…”, I’m going to make some popcorn.
To relate a statement to the existing topic, a metaphorical extension of its “therefore” sense to “considering that…” or “in light of what we’ve been discussing…”.
As a generic discourse marker, to take a moment to gather one’s thoughts, just like the others above.
When did it start?
It’s hard to say. (I can’t find a satisfactory source.) Formal discourse markers, such as Beowulf’s hwæt mentioned in another answer, are well attested in written records. They particularly appear in texts of the sort meant to be performed—poems, epics, songs, plays, and so on—that is, not so much in tax records and epitaphs.
So in particular has been used in roughly this way, meaning “thus”/“therefore”, for hundreds of years, since early modern English. NPR claims that the specific use of so as a discourse marker for introducing an explanation rose to mainstream infamy from about the 1980s to the early 2000s, possibly influenced by the English of Silicon Valley during the tech boom.
Is it just a "pause" word…
No, but, so, it can definitely function that way too, so, yeah.
…(and is there a word for that)?
There is! That’s a filler word, such as “um”, “like”, “er”, “ah”, and all those other little interjections. “Just” is a bit belittling: filler words serve an important pragmatic role in conversation, namely, they signal that you’re thinking or pausing but still holding the floor.
As it happens, I rarely use those kinds of filler, and as a result, I’m often met with “What?” or interrupted, because I pause without an indication that I’m not done yet, so people tend to assume I am done. They either have trouble parsing my half-sentence as a full one, or mistakenly think it’s their turn. I’m not quite following the rules for discourse dynamics, and it trips us up.
Is it grammatically correct?
Yes. It’s used and understood by native speakers of many dialects now and I’d say it forms an everyday part of informal spoken standard English.
Am I the only one that finds it annoying?
Nope, in the late aughts to early teens (when this question was originally asked) there was a spike in grumbling about this usage as it reached mainstream saturation. As always, you’re free to get annoyed by any language change you like, or rather, dislike, but it’s worth reminding ourselves that “I don’t like it” is not the same thing as “It’s bad”.
The sentence in the OQ
To say which method is better, it's a relative thing.
is a Left-Dislocation of the sentence
It's a relative thing to say which method is better.
which itself comes from Extraposition of the sentence
To say which method is better is a relative thing.
Now, since the communicational purpose of extraposition of an infinitive subject is to move heavy NPs to the end of the sentence, where they can be processed more easily in a Right-Branching language like English, and the purpose of left dislocation is to move the important part of the sentence to the beginning, using both of them together does nothing useful except add parasitic structure and a dummy it subject to the original.
So the structure is a wash, right away. As for the predicate be a relative thing, this is overage from be relative, in the sense of relative that means 'varying widely in context (and consequently difficult to judge)'.
If some thing is relative, then it is a relative thing, right? Again, piling on more words to make it come out better; not always an optimum solution.
So, instead of asking whether one particular sentence out of literally trillions is "correct", you might better ask where this sentence came from, what it's sposta mean, and to whom; and why there might be a problem with it -- and possibly with some others like it, because you can't ask individual questions about trillions of sentences.
Best Answer
Thy and thine are archaic forms corresponding to your and yours respectively. Use thy where you would use your (but see note at end of answer) and thine where you would use yours.
Her and hers do not have alternate/archaic forms. Her is used as a possessive the same way my or your is, and hers is used like mine or yours.
(Note: if the noun placed after thy begins with a vowel sound, use thine instead: thy book, but thine eyes. Archaically, the same was done with my and mine, but this is no longer common usage outside of some poetic use.)