Why is "How are you" but not "How is You" correct?

Question

My English is not very good. I just want to ask this simple question:

"These are","this is", "those are", "that is" means "are" is used for plural, but when asking to someone how is he, why people use "are': "how are you" instead of "how is you"?

Answer 1

The answer is simple: you can be either plural or singular semantically, but grammatically it is always plural. (The same is true of they.)

This is not unusual at all if you look at other languages. The semantically singular second-person you is grammatically:

• a third-person plural in German
• a third-person singular in Spanish
• a second-person plural in Russian

In English, you originally was a second-person plural. For the singular you, there was a different word: thou (cf. German Du, Spanish tu, Russian ты). So you would ask "how are you", but "how is thou" (more accurately, "how art thou", but that is going too deep). However, by now thou is obsolete and archaic. You has taken over.

Answer 2

The same personal pronoun rule is followed in both statements and questions:

• I am happy
• You are happy
• He is happy

How are you? just follows the rule.

Answer 3

Because in this is etc, this (these, that, those) is syntactically the subject, so the verb agrees with it.

In How are you?, how is not a noun phrase, and so cannot function as subject. The sentence is inverted (as is usual in questions in English), and the subject is you, following the verb.

Compare What do you want?, where what is not the subject, so the verb do agrees with the subject you, which follows it.