[HN Gopher] Did English ever have a formal version of "you"? (2011)
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Did English ever have a formal version of "you"? (2011)
Author : ent101
Score : 212 points
Date : 2023-12-24 18:25 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (english.stackexchange.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (english.stackexchange.com)
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Thee and Thou are still used in Northern England (Yorkshire and
| Lancashire). Although probably only by older people and often
| spoken as Thi and Tha.
| eyphka wrote:
| Interesting, and are those used as the informal you? Or in
| reference to singular?
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| I think Thee would be for family, friends, or someone of
| equal social status and thou is more formal (but much less
| used now - only as tha: "tha's gonna get it").
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| That's fascinating , because it's originally a
| subject/object divide (equivalent to he/him)
| Caligatio wrote:
| I feel like this must be fading because I lived in North
| Yorkshire for almost 5 years and never heard a thee/thou used.
| On the other hand, English dialects are hyper localized so
| there might be villages where it is normal.
| EGreg wrote:
| Go to Amish country!
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Don't they use Pennsylvania Dutch ???.
| sampo wrote:
| "You" is the formal version. But as the answers explain, English
| did also have the informal version.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Yes. We think of "thee" and "thou" as being formal, because
| nowadays they are mainly found in religious texts. But they
| used to be informal, used when addressing friends and children.
| As the top answer explains, "thee" and "thou" eventually came
| to be considered rude.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| It isn't so much that they're mainly found in religious texts
| as that the most common English translation of the Bible is
| still the King James Version which is over 400 years old and
| "thou" was still part of the English language back then.
|
| The other other English text most people are familiar with
| that is older than the KJV would be the works of Shakespeare
| which arguably need to be translated to modern English at
| this point. English language works older than Shakespeare
| such as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Beowulf are pretty
| much always read in translation.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| To be fair though, Beowulf in its original form would be
| incomprehensible even to well read native English speakers.
| Old English and Modern English are so different that
| they're no longer mutually intelligible even. Same goes for
| a lot of languages if you compare them to themselves a
| millennium apart. Or if their common ancestor was milennia
| ago.
|
| E.g Icelandic and Faroese aren't really mutually
| intelligible with Norwegian today, despite both being
| evolved directly from Old Norwegian, because both places
| were originally settled by Norwegian vikings.
|
| Shakepeare is essentially just very old school, yet still
| Modern English. This still feels within the realm of
| understanding of current day native speakers equipped with
| a good dictionary.
| dahart wrote:
| I had never until just now considered the possibility that "you"
| might be the thorn misprint of "thou", just like how in "ye olde
| shoppe" was (according to legend) pronounced "the old shop"
| because Y got used in printing presses as a stand-in for the
| thorn "Th" character they didn't have, that looks kinda-sorta
| like a Y.
|
| Seems like the answers suggest I'm just imagining something that
| didn't happen, but it was a fun thought.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Eth is the character you're thinking if, not thorn.
|
| Eth has voice on and thorn voice off.
| dahart wrote:
| This says it really was thorn:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_olde#History
|
| D/d (eth) certainly is the voiced th in Old English and
| modern Icelandic. I'm not sure why thorn was being used for
| 'the'.
| n_plus_1_acc wrote:
| AFAIK thorn and eth were used in free variation, as there
| is rarely any possibility of confusion.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| I would recommend consulting Prokosh Comparative Germanic
| Grammar.
|
| It's a very old reference and may not be online, but what
| my germanic linguistics professor used with us Germanic
| linguistics grad students. He was a world renowned expert
| on the various futhark versions.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmer_H._Antonsen
| blown_gasket wrote:
| I'm not huge on taking the Wikipedia entry at face value
| and prefer to look at the references used for the entry. In
| this case the reference CHAPTER 25 TYPOGRAPHY AND THE
| PRINTED ENGLISH TEXT, page 6, does mention that y/ye was
| used in place of both eth and thorn.
| nicole_express wrote:
| The eth/thorn distinction was fairly arbitrary in actual
| written Old English, with thorn being more common. The modern
| distinction between eth and thorn being based off of voice
| originated in Icelandic, I think? That's the only language
| that still uses them in its modern form, anyways.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Icelandic preserves old Norse so you're accidentally
| implying Old Norse originated in its own derivative.
| Symmetry wrote:
| I believe it was a stand in for y instead of Th, which is a
| much smaller leap.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Your first unicode character won't render in Windows.
|
| th?
|
| I can see it is LATIN SMALL LETTER Y + COMBINING LATIN SMALL
| LETTER S .. not sure what that ligature is, though. My
| knowledge of old English is very lacking :)
| mh- wrote:
| it's a lowercase _y_ with an _s_ over it, like you would
| see a diacritic rendered. never seen it before.
|
| edit: it shows up in the "descendants" list on the side of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| That seems unlikely. From wiktionary:
|
| _From Middle English you, yow, yow (object case of ye), from
| Old English eow ("you", dative case of ge), from Proto-
| Germanic_ iwwiz ("you", dative case of _jiz), Western form of_
| izwiz ("you", dative case of _juz), from Proto-Indo-European_
| yus ("you", plural), _yu._
|
| Gutenbergs printing press was the mid 15th century, well into
| the Middle English era.
| k__ wrote:
| In German, we use "sie" the German equivalent of "they".
|
| Thus, to be polite, you address someone as many people that
| aren't part of the conversation.
| yurishimo wrote:
| Dutch is similar with "U" being both singular and plural. Verb
| conjugation is the same for both cases.
|
| This has been interesting as an English speaker learning Dutch!
| Luckily I never really latched on to sms-speak but I can
| imagine some cohorts of English speakers have to break the
| habit of reading "u" as shorthand for the the full word.
| JW_00000 wrote:
| This lead me down a short Wikipedia rabbit-hole that is quite
| interesting (at least to me).
|
| Apparently Dutch originally had "du" as 2nd person singular
| and "gij" as 2nd person plural. From the 16th century, "gij"
| started being used as singular polite form. (Possibly under
| the influence of Latin and French.) Later, "du" disappeared.
| Up to this point, the progression is similar to English.
|
| "gij" then transformed to "jij" in the northern part of the
| Dutch language area and in written language; while it
| remained "gij" in Flemish spoken language.
|
| However, then in the 17th century people started using "Uwe
| Edelheit" ("Your Nobility") as a new formal form in letters.
| This evolved into the current formal pronoun "u".
|
| (Note also that the accusative form of "gij" is also "u", but
| is not related to the formal "u".)
|
| Sources: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gij,
| https://etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/gij,
| https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_(voornaamwoord),
| https://etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/u
| Tomte wrote:
| No, it's "Sie", not "sie", and therefore not identical to third
| person.
| sinkasapa wrote:
| This is why the British and people in the US do not act the
| same. The British have their behaviour while us Americans
| have our behavior. Totally different.
| konschubert wrote:
| That's just spelling.
| atoav wrote:
| In a German sentence a change in capitalization of Sie can
| very well turn a "formal you" (Sie) into a more general
| "them" (sie). So it is not just spelling, although it is a
| very common mistake.
| aqme28 wrote:
| Not to be confused with "sie", which means "she"
| vidarh wrote:
| This is a minor distinction to make it clear in writing, same
| as De vs de in Norwegian, and several other languages. It's a
| common way of turning a plural into a formal address.
|
| Incidentally, in Norwegian the formal form is now so archaic
| that short of communicating very formally with a very old
| person, in most cases it will come across as rude and
| sarcastic (you're implying someone is seriously up
| themselves)
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| The same is in italian "lei", except during fascism where they
| introduced as a formal way to address someone as "voi" which
| would be the plural of "tu"/"voi"
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Did they not like the feminine connection between "lei" and
| "Lei"? Or what was the motivation?
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| Afaik it was because the "Lei" was considered elitist and
| because in the roman latin culture they had only the "tu"
| up to caesar introduced the "voi", so maybe you know
| fascists had some sort of fetish for the roman empire so
| they chose to bring the culture as close as possible closer
| to what roman culture was
| NewsyHacker wrote:
| Caesar didn't "introduce the _voi_ ". Is this an urban
| myth that Italians believe? The _tu_ / _vous_ distinction
| in Romance languages arose in medieval times. Not only
| did it not exist in Caesar 's time, it is absent from the
| centuries of Imperial-era literature in Latin.
|
| There is a wide literature on Latin forms of address.
| Eleanor Dickey's monograph published by Oxford University
| Press is a good survey.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| I am not an historian but it seems so, I've found in the
| past few minutes two sources that attribute Voi to
| romans, its in italian but sure it can be translated,
| going to paste the original links unaltered
|
| https://www.elisamotterle.com/galateo-del-tu-del-lei-e-
| del-v...
|
| https://www.treccani.it/magazine/atlante/cultura/Diamoci_
| del...
|
| Beware the treccani is the most used/influential
| encyclopaedia in italy, so I'd tend to say that i trust
| them a lot
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treccani
| NewsyHacker wrote:
| Your first link backs up exactly what I mentioned above:
|
| > In antichita, quando si parlava latino, le formule di
| cortesia non esistevano ... L'usanza del Voi nasce
| insieme a una nuova formula politica: la tetrarchia
| introdotta nel 293 da Diocleziano.
|
| It was an innovation in Romance that took place centuries
| after Caesar and most of the Imperial era. Again, there
| is ample scholarly literature on this, so no need to
| resort to popular references like encyclopedias.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| Yeah I saw that, but I'd say if that makes sense, that
| they're attributing the introduction of "Voi" within the
| roman era and not in the medieval times, right? The
| second one instead attributes it to "Roma Cesarea", to be
| fair, it is not the encyclopaedia that attributes it to
| "Roma Cesarea" but the article that influenced Mussolini
| quoted on the article on the encyclopaedia, so they're
| probably only quoting, but I don't know enough, so I'd
| trust you're right, thank you
| NewsyHacker wrote:
| Historians today tend to trace the ultimate fall of the
| Roman Empire to the multiple crises of the third century,
| even if the name of the empire limped on for a couple of
| centuries more. So AD 293 is quite a late date, on the
| threshold to a new era. From the viewpoint of modern
| historians, it is hard to understand how Italian Fascism
| could have seen anything that late as worth being proud
| of and emulating.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| It's much easier to understand if one doesn't assume that
| Fascism ever cared about academic truth.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| Probably you're right, they just needed something widely
| known to make people feel some sort of national
| identity/united/proud and control them better
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| > trace the ultimate fall of the Roman Empire to
|
| Or the plague and the subsequent Arab invasions. The
| empire was rebounded several times from near collapse
| after the 300s
| NewsyHacker wrote:
| The Western Empire was the only Roman Empire that the
| Italian Fascists ever really cared about. Early Byzantium
| was totally foreign to their mythology.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| It makes sense to me: high ranking people often have
| conversations which are on the behalf (or at least implicate
| the future) of large groups of people. Thus a plural formal
| second person, as well as the "royal we".
|
| (note that english aristocrats were often spoken of, not by
| given [or if they had one, family] name, but by the
| geographical entity that was the basis of their nobility)
| ribs wrote:
| Like in Spanish, where the formal second-person pronouns are
| the same as the third-person pronouns.
| k__ wrote:
| What about ellos/ellas?
| propter_hoc wrote:
| Second person pronouns are so fascinating!
|
| Not only is "you" the formal, polite plural form, but calling
| someone "thou" was also seen as so informal as to be rude (in
| verb form, to "thou" someone). This has a modern equivalent in
| the term "tutoyer" in French.
|
| https://www.etymonline.com/word/thou
|
| An interesting counterpoint is the usage in Japanese of
| sarcastically polite forms like oQian and Gui Yang , where you
| use a pronoun with a surface meaning of extreme respect, as a
| form of insult.
| Geisterde wrote:
| Shipmate is used to describe someone who you crew a ship with,
| such as in the navy, and is supposed to convey comradery. E
| xcept in its real world use, where its the social equivalent of
| referring to someone as "s**head".
| mgbmtl wrote:
| I guess like "comrade", any kind of imposed social norm
| becomes an object of satire?
| Geisterde wrote:
| I think so, I remember a joke bill burr made about any term
| used to describe the mentally underdeveloped will
| inevitably be used satirically.
| javajosh wrote:
| Interesting. I wonder if the similarity of the words "ship"
| and "shit" contributed to the development. Out of curiosity,
| what is the non-pejorative replacement for shipmate?
| Geisterde wrote:
| Just common english slang, bro, dude, whatevers on their
| nametag or a first name/nickname if they have one; nothing
| dissimilar to civilian life and I think thats largely the
| point, even last names are commonly referred to as "slave
| names". Formal speech is all ranks, "hey chief", "yes petty
| officer".
| christophilus wrote:
| The US south still uses ma'am and sir as polite forms of
| address, but it's also often used sarcastically (where the
| ma'am or sir is exaggerated: "Well, yes, MA'am!")
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| That seems to be true across the country (it's been the case
| everywhere I've been, at least).
| pavlov wrote:
| Interestingly the formality ladder flips at the very top of the
| hierarchy. Kings and popes must be addressed diffusely with
| plurals and layered references to official status ("Your
| Imperial Majesty"), but the Christian God above them is a
| "thou" in every European language.
|
| (Useless trivia bit... Apparently Emperor Charles V invented
| the styling of "His Majesty". Before him, kings and emperors
| were addressed as highnesses, but he wanted something fancier
| after being crowned as the Holy Roman Emperor in addition to
| the kingships he already held.)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| That's because the english notion of informal/formal is a
| poor fit for the modern, symmetric use of T-V.
|
| It's more of a social distance, with V-form for people
| outside the personal sphere, and T-form for people outside
| the public sphere.
|
| So, as an atheist, I'd use V-form* with the Christian God,
| but His Believers really ought to be using T-form with Him.
|
| * Si vous plait, j'aimerais bien savior comment fonctionne la
| turbulence ... mais ne vous inquietez pas si l'explication
| serait trop complique !
| umanwizard wrote:
| La turbulence ?
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbulence#Kolmogorov's_the
| ory...
|
| see also https://www.newscientist.com/letter/mg12416936-8
| 00-letter-la...
|
| (but the way I heard the joke is that the scientist has
| planned to ask Him how to resolve gravitation with
| quantum mechanics, and only then the bystanders inquire,
| why not ask about turbulence?)
| rayiner wrote:
| That's fascinating. In Bangla, "thui" is the very informal
| second person pronoun (like what am older sibling would say to
| a younger sibling).
| selimthegrim wrote:
| See also https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/yeten#Middle_English
| (Etymology 2), where ye (and yeet[!]) were its descendants (to
| ye someone was a thing as well)
| pm215 wrote:
| There seems to be a certain amount of "euphemism treadmill" in
| Japanese pronouns, where they start off polite and drift
| downward in acceptability to be replaced by new ones. I have a
| grammar book from 1906 ("Hossfeld's Japanese Grammar") which
| effectively documents some of that drift: for second person
| pronouns, apparently you could still get away with "addressing
| inferiors familiarly" with 'kisama' in 1906, so it hadn't yet
| dropped to the insult level it has now. 'nushi' is also listed,
| glossed 'contemptuous', and I don't think anybody uses 'nushi'
| as an insult today. 'Anata' and 'omae' are the 1906 recommended
| pronouns.
| yongjik wrote:
| Korean also suffers from similar issues, where it's a bit
| more ridiculous: the textbook version of "polite" 2nd
| singular pronoun ("dangsin") has fallen so low that it's
| pretty much an insult now, and no other term has taken its
| place. As a result, modern Korean arguably does not have a
| polite 2nd person singular pronoun.
|
| We somehow make do - it helps that Korean allows just
| omitting pronoun when the context is clear (same as
| Japanese).
| ghaff wrote:
| The page also gets into the plural form being used for the
| singular over time (as is increasingly the case with English, at
| least in the US, when you want to avoid specifying a masculine or
| feminine third-person singular).
| yawaramin wrote:
| 'Thou' is also used in English prayers ('Thy kingdom come, thy
| will be done'), as a mark of a personal closeness to God.
| tom_ wrote:
| "You" would be ambiguous anyway, and might imply that you are
| addressing more than one, contravening the first commandment.
| dustincoates wrote:
| That's really more due to the influence of the King James
| Version than anything else. For example, ESV uses you:
| https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%206%3A5...
|
| In French, however, God is always referred to with the informal
| tu, which surprises second language learners. But it makes
| sense when you realize that using plural for formal came about
| well after the Hebrew Bible, and because it was to implicitly
| refer to multiple people (sort of like the royal We), which
| obviously wouldn't be acceptable in Christianity.
| dwheeler wrote:
| More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou
|
| This should be common knowledge for native English speakers. It's
| hard to read Shakespeare without knowing this. But for non-native
| speaker, this would be mysterious.
| baxtr wrote:
| According to the article "you" was formal and "thou" informal.
| fsckboy wrote:
| from the spelling i assume they were pronounced the same, but
| hopefully they both rhymed with thou.
| o11c wrote:
| Note that "you" is actually the object form, so the table
| is unfortunately not arranged the obvious way:
| single plural used in contexts of thou ye
| nominative (subject), vocative (preceded by the word "O").
| For the singular, this implies that the relevant verb takes
| the "-[e]st" suffix. thee you all object
| forms (direct object, indirect object, object of
| preposition) thy your possessive determiner,
| before consonant sounds - thy will, thy God thine
| your possessive determiner, before vowel sounds
| (including 'h') - thine enemy, thine head thine
| yours possessive pronoun - not my will but thine, all
| that I have is thine
|
| (the last distinction used to by used for my/mine, and is
| still used for a/an)
| zirgs wrote:
| Yes - and this is how it is in a lot of other Indo-European
| languages too.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Or King James Bible - some Christians stick to the original
| translation (1611).
| NewsyHacker wrote:
| Why do you think the KJV is the "original translation"? As
| far as English translations of Scripture go, it was preceded
| by the Wycliffe Bible. And a translation of the Gospels was
| produced in the Old English era.
| biorach wrote:
| While technically true this is somewhat pedantic, the KJV
| was the first vernacular translation to be widely available
| in the English speaking world and is a hugely influential
| text for literary English, so just take "original" here in
| a metaphoric sense.
| o11c wrote:
| Everybody uses the 1769 update actually.
| majormajor wrote:
| "In the 17th century, thou fell into disuse in the standard
| language"
|
| Why would that need to be common knowledge 3-400 years later
| then?
| flappyeagle wrote:
| Because there are many still-popular and important literary
| works like those of Shakespeare and the King James Bible
| which benefit from understanding the distinction.
| panarky wrote:
| For most of my life I've quietly despised the people in the
| church of my youth for switching to thee/thou/thy in public
| prayers. I always thought this was grandstanding
| performance of piety, or cargo cult mumbo jumbo, or both.
|
| It just seemed so silly to think that God only understands
| archaic English.
|
| Now it turns out these people I despised were only being
| respectful, and trying to use the formal forms?
|
| However, since it seems that "thee" and "thou" were
| actually the _informal_ forms of "you" in 17th century
| English, now I'm really confused why they suddenly started
| talking this way the moment they crossed the threshold of
| the church.
| trealira wrote:
| > However, since it seems that "thee" and "thou" are the
| informal forms of "you", now I'm really confused why they
| do this.
|
| Unnecessary reverence of the King James Bible
| translation, probably.
| janandonly wrote:
| As far as I know, _you_ actually is the formal,
| originally plural version (ye /you/your) and thou was the
| informal version (thou/thee/thy/thine). Over time, thou
| became impolitely informal and is now no longer used,
| though interestingly enough, nowadays it might even be
| perceived as more formal than you because it's archaic
| and survives almost exclusively in liturgical language.
| dwheeler wrote:
| In Old English "thou" is singular, "you" is plural.
|
| As noted in Wikipedia:
|
| > As William Tyndale translated the Bible into English in
| the early 16th century, he preserved the singular and
| plural distinctions that he found in his Hebrew and Greek
| originals. He used thou for the singular and ye for the
| plural regardless of the relative status of the speaker
| and the addressee. Tyndale's usage was standard for the
| period and mirrored that found in the earlier Wycliffe's
| Bible and the later King James Bible.
|
| Later, presumably due to French influence, "thou" became
| informal and "you" formal.
|
| Finally "thou" was dropped from everyday speech, though
| it still shows up in various old phrases.
| MeImCounting wrote:
| Shakespeare, Chaucer, Bronte, Cervantes etc. Unless youre
| suggesting knowledge of classic literature shouldnt be
| common?
| neaden wrote:
| The Goblin Emperor by Sarah Monette (writing as Katherine
| Addison) is a secondary world fantasy that uses you/thou as a way
| of incorporating formality. It's interesting way of helping
| understand the whole manner/formality system of the setting.
| Semiapies wrote:
| Also the royal "we".
| delduca wrote:
| The same happened with Portuguese in Brazil, 'Vos Merces', which
| is formal, is used throughout the country as (simplified) 'voce'.
| And the informal form, 'tu', is rarely used (only in the South).
| simtel20 wrote:
| Oh, interesting, is vosmice a mispronouncing of vos merces too?
| delduca wrote:
| I believe so, and tuh (or thu, don't remember) linked in the
| article has the same sound
| mito88 wrote:
| vossa merce, vosmece, vossemece.
| kawa wrote:
| "Thou" sounds very similar to german "du" which is the current
| informal form. In older german the second person plural ('Ihr',
| similar to "vous" french from which "you" may come) was also the
| formal form, but it's out of fashion for a few centuries now.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| Indeed, it's the same word! In the ancestor language of both
| English and German (and also Dutch, Low German, and many
| others) it's been reconstructed as "thu".
| hinkley wrote:
| For flowery speech we escalate to sentence fragments. Your Grace,
| Your Eminence, Madam President, Your Honor. Or honorifics in
| front of or around proper names, like Mister Rogers, Doctor
| House, Nurse Ratched (anarchic now, the doctors have one that PR
| campaign) or "General Granger, Sir". There are some parliamentary
| ones that pretty much only show on in Congress and on CSPAN.
| biztos wrote:
| And my favorite one (in UK): Governor!
| verditelabs wrote:
| In my native Texan English, "y'all" can certainly act as a
| singular polite "you" (EDIT: though it is not terribly common). I
| often use "Howdy, how y'all doin?" as a polite greeting to people
| I don't know regardless of the number of people I am addressing,
| though switch to just "you" after making acquaintance. Funny
| enough, "howdy" is a contraction of the older "how do ye" and
| some people still consider it both a greeting _and_ an inquiry,
| so in some cases it's redundant, and others it isn't, depending
| on the listener.
| lstamour wrote:
| That's interesting. As a non-Texan, I'd assumed that since
| y'all is a contraction that it would signify a more casual tone
| in the same way that "He'll" is less formal than "He will",
| etc.
| bxparks wrote:
| Wait, wat? I always thought that "y'all" was a contraction of
| "you all", so meant the "plural you" instead of the "singular
| you".
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I think you have to say "all y'all" for the plural.
| majormajor wrote:
| This Texan's understanding:
|
| "Y'all" = plural you
|
| "All y'all" = "all of [plural] you" as distinct from "some
| of you/y'all"
|
| Don't think I've ever heard a singular y'all. "How ya
| doin'" would be the singular version of "How y'all doin"
| verditelabs wrote:
| For me, "y'all" has multiple forms
|
| "y'all" - explicitly addressing >1 person
|
| "y'all" - explicitly addressing 1 person while implicitly
| addressing >1 people. I might say "how y'all doin" to a
| friend, implying "how are you and your family doing"
|
| "all y'all" - >>1 person or addressing >1 person that was
| not included in the previous "y'all"
|
| "y'all" - explicitly and implicitly addressing 1 person
| whom I have not made acquaintance with. If I were working
| as a server in a restaurant and had a single person come
| in, I may address them with "y'all". "What can I get
| y'all?" is the same as "what can I get you?" but the
| "y'all" gives it some extra politeness or an "emphatic
| southern accent"
| naniwaduni wrote:
| It would hardly be the first time a second-person plural
| turned into a formal second-person singular...
| pruetj wrote:
| Interesting on the "y'all". I'm a Texan and have never
| addressed a singular person as y'all. If I do address a person
| as y'all as in "How are y'all doing?", it's assumed I'm
| speaking of the family unit that person belongs to rather than
| the individual.
|
| While we Texans might find it polite or friendly, in the
| corporate world I've been told to avoid using it in emails.
| verditelabs wrote:
| I think you're right about the implicit group/family aspect
| in many cases. If I'm taking to one friend and say "how are
| y'all doing" then that friend's family or ingroup is
| certainly implied in the question.
|
| The singular polite "y'all" I'm referring to is generally
| used when the other party is not known. F.ex. I regularly,
| though certainly not always, hear clerks, waiters, or other
| service industry workers using "y'all" singularly when asking
| "what can I get y'all to eat" or "y'all need anything else"
| when speaking to exactly one person, and I use it that way
| myself.
| pruetj wrote:
| Ah, got it. I know what you are referring to now. Yea, it
| is seen in hospitality more often.
| stavros wrote:
| Contrarily, I use it more and more in work contexts, as it's
| the most convenient second person plural you can use.
| J_Shelby_J wrote:
| Y'all is a perfectly cromulent gender neutral way to address a
| group of people in a professional setting.
| lokar wrote:
| See also: yinz
| jesprenj wrote:
| Slovene has three levels of politeness:
|
| * ti (second person singular)
|
| * vi (second person plural)
|
| * oni (third person plural) -- archaic
| dkga wrote:
| It's just like Southwestern Brazilian Portuguese uses "voce" as
| the informal second person singular, while ironically the origin
| of this word is the formal version of this pronoun. Currently the
| formal second person singular is actually a third-person pronoun,
| "o senhor" or "a senhora" depending on the gender. Although there
| is incredible differences in how the formal/informal pronouns are
| applied: in my family we were taught to only use the informal
| with everybody no matter what, and in some of my friends'
| families the practice is to use the formal even when addressing
| one's parents.
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| There must be some links between French and English where in
| French, the formal version is "vous" which sounds like "you" and
| the informal is "toi" which maybe sounded like "thou" in the
| past. (The 'th' has no equivalent in French)
| retrac wrote:
| Yes. The tu and thou pronouns are related. So are me and moi,
| nos and ours. In Hindi me and you are mai and tu. In Russian
| they are menya and tubya. (Sorry for errors in
| transliteration.). English I and Fench je are related too. Old
| English ich and Latin ego make the link more obvious.
|
| Pronouns tend to be some of the most fixed words in a language,
| up there with numbers and basic words like for "water" or
| "mother". They undergo sound change, and shifts like how
| English lost thou, but they are almost never replaced
| wholesale.
|
| All those languages are in fact descended from a common
| language spoken several thousand years ago. About half of the
| world today speaks a language in the Indo-European language
| family.
| nicole_express wrote:
| The English T-V distinction seems to have originated after the
| Norman Conquest, where French became the language of the
| aristocracy; wouldn't be surprised if that was exactly the
| source.
| rahen wrote:
| French and English coexisted as neighbor languages for more
| than a millenium, so there are a lot of both subtle and obvious
| similarities between the two.
| madhadron wrote:
| That's because they're very closely related languages. English
| is a mix of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French, after the Norman
| invasion of England in the 11th century. Norman French is how
| the Norse diaspora in Normandy mixed their Germanic tongue with
| the local dialects of Latin. And the Romance and Germanic
| languages are both pretty closely related branches of Indo-
| European, which is also a pretty narrow language family to
| start with. For example, 'tu' from French comes from mixing
| Norse 'du' with Latin 'tuus'...both of which come from deeper
| roots. Proto Indo-European reconstructs this as 'tuH'.
| ashton314 wrote:
| There's a part in Hamlet where Claudius (Hamlet's uncle, the one
| who killed Hamlet's father and married his mother Gertrude and
| became king) tells Gertrude, "go talk to _your_ son" after Hamlet
| angers him. Note that it's not "our son" or even "thy son"--the
| choice of "you" here is really biting once you know the
| distinction.
| slyall wrote:
| There is a scene in The Lord of the Rings (Book) where Eowyn
| switches to using "thou" and "thee" when begging Aragorn to take
| her with him when he takes the Paths of the Dead.
|
| If you don't know (as I didn't for a long time) that she has
| switched to intimate/informal language then the scene has less
| impact. Especially since Aragorn keeps things formal in his
| reply.
|
| http://coco.raceme.org/literature/lordoftherings/returnking/...
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Also see, the sun also rises because hemmingway transliterated
| a ton of Spanish, including thees, thous, some colloquialisms
| panarky wrote:
| You might be thinking of Hemingway's novelization of his
| experience supporting antifascists in the Spanish Civil War,
| "For Whom the Bell Tolls".
|
| He uses "thee" and "thou" to simulate the informal Spanish
| "tu".
| retrac wrote:
| This is a very common misinterpretation. A major factor behind
| such misinterpretation is probably the King James Bible. It
| heavily influences our sense of style even today. God is
| traditionally addressed with thou due to the intimate
| relationship, and today this is often misinterpreted as formal
| style. E.g.
|
| > Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and
| power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure
| they are and were created.
| entuno wrote:
| This is very noticeable in the Athrabeth, where Finrod switches
| between "you" and "thou" when talking to Andreth throughout the
| conversation.
|
| Tolkien also talks in Appendix F of The Return of the King
| about how hobbits had largely lost the distinction between
| "you" and "thou" - so when Pippin speaks to Denethor in Minas
| Tirith and addresses him with the familial term, people assume
| that he must be royalty himself to address the Steward in such
| an informal manner.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| > must be royalty himself
|
| Technically I guess he was about as close to royalty as you
| can get in the Shire.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _Afterthought: the post below illustrates the paucity of modern
| English in that nowadays in modern English no distinction is made
| between the second and third person 'you' whereas in other
| languages such as German it still is._
|
| __
|
| I've mentioned on HN previously when discussing languages that
| when my father was learning German his old textbook had the
| English _thee, thou,_ and _thine /thy_ as the second person for
| the German second person _du._
|
| One of the faux pas for English speakers when learning German is
| the incorrect usage of _du._ They mistakenly use _du_ instead of
| _sie_ because it 's more informal than _sie_ not realizing that
| in German it is reserved for the closest of relationships such as
| family, lovers etc.
|
| Essentially, in German _du_ -- the equivalent form of the second
| person English _thou_ -- is still a part of the living language
| whereas in English _thou_ is now archaic.
|
| The correct usage of _du_ became immediately obvious to me after
| seeing my father 's textbook. For the life of me I cannot
| understand why modern English textbooks simply substitute _you_
| for _du,_ it 's just crazy as it leads to much confusion.
|
| _Thou_ and variants are understood by most native English
| speakers even if the term is now archaic so it makes sense to use
| it instead of _you_ in textbooks for learning German. Just one
| additional paragraph would be needed to explain and clean up the
| _you /du_ mess.
|
| I have been trying for years to find out why the authors of
| modern (current) textbooks now use _you_ instead of _thou._ I 'd
| be most grateful if someone who knows the rationale behind it
| would post the reason.
|
| Incidentally, my father's textbook was published sometime around
| 1930, so this _you_ substitution is a relatively recent
| phenomena.
| baxtr wrote:
| I've heard that "Sie Asshole" is the proper way to insult
| someone while staying polite.
| atoav wrote:
| "Sie Arschloch" is funny in that it highlights that one:
|
| 1. has enough manners to not call people you don't know "du"
| (and you are not letting emotionality override those manners)
|
| 2. yet you know that person well enough to judge their
| behaviour and call them out as an asshole
|
| It is a bit like punching someone with velvet gloves.
| biztos wrote:
| > it is reserved for the closest of relationships such as
| family, lovers etc.
|
| You use _du_ for your friends, your classmates, people your own
| age up through about college, and anyone you think you are or
| should be on informal terms with. Such as shop workers
| (sometimes), bartenders (usually), waiters (depending on
| location), random people in the street (in places like Berlin,
| if they 're not senior citizens), and anyone -- regardless of
| age or station -- who has said _du_ to you first, unless you
| want to very specifically snub them. You use _du_ with people
| you play Fussball against even if you 've never met them before
| and they're ten years older than you. Same with drinking. It
| would, perhaps counterintuitively, be rude to use _Sie_ in many
| social situations involving complete strangers. Unless they 're
| old.
|
| Then there is the ritual, rarely followed anymore, of actually
| formally suggesting that you and someone else -- usually a work
| colleague -- use _du_ with each other... and refusing that
| request is giving a very cold shoulder, there normally would
| not be another offer in one lifetime. (An "inferior" should
| not suggest it to his/her "superior," that would also be
| inappropriate.)
|
| _Du_ does enough work in German as she is spoke, I don 't
| think it makes sense for foreigners to learn the _Sie_ form
| before having proper facility with all the _du_ grammar. Given
| the immigration trends of the last 20 years, people will just
| be happy to hear German in the first place. Then learn to
| properly _siezen_ when you 're already conversational. My zwo
| Pfennig anyway.
| pvg wrote:
| I'll second just about all of this, the one bit of colour I
| can add - years ago I had a summer job in a German-speaking
| (auto) shop where a majority of the workers, including some
| of the management were immigrants with a fairly wide range of
| German proficiency but everyone had picked up the onsite
| du/Sie conventions (along with some others like shaking hands
| at the beginning of the shift). It's, like you're saying, as
| much a cultural convention with contextual intricacies as it
| is a grammatical feature of the language.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Right, see my reply to _biztos._
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _First, note my correction to the mistake in the above
| 'Afterthought'. Brain wasn't in gear._
|
| _
|
| Thanks for the info. My German is far from perfect so I don't
| claim any authority on the matter.
|
| Most of my time in a German-speaking environment was in
| Austria (Wien) and that was now some years ago. Back when I
| was learning the language it was always stressed to me not to
| use _du_ even with friends as it would be deemed as unwanted
| or excessive familiarity and could be taken as an offense.
|
| That said, from my limited experience there's are significant
| cultural differences between, say, Berlin and Wien with the
| latter being more formal and reserved (or it was so when I
| was living there two decades ago). Thus I find your
| observation interesting, so I'm now quite curious to see what
| cultural shifts if any have taken place in Wien since then.
|
| My first time there was in the early 1980s whilst Communism
| was still in place, so back then there was essentially no
| movement of people between Czechoslovakia, Hungary, etc. and
| Austria. When I went back in the early 1990 and lived there
| at various times for about a decade I noticed a definite
| cultural shift which the locals put down to the movement of
| people from ex-communist counties such as Slovenia. However I
| can't say I noticed any shift in the language, but then
| that's not surprising as most people I worked or dealt with
| were better at English than I was in German.
|
| No doubt things have become more informal almost everywhere
| these days so I'm not surprised that there has been a shift
| in German usage just as there has been in English--even in my
| lifetime it's been very noticeable.
|
| English is a dog of language, it's slipshod, inconsistent and
| all over the place (it beats me how anyone who is not a
| native speaker ever learns it). The point I was making about
| _thou /du_ illustrates the problem with English quite well,
| English-speakers are notoriously bad at learning second
| languages so why make, say, learning German even more complex
| by not explaining actual parallels between the two languages?
| It seems no one cares much about the details these days.
|
| As an aside, in English _you_ goes for everything--friends,
| relatives, one 's dog, even inanimate objects. Thus it's
| interesting to note slang has picked up the cudgels and
| fought back with a colloquial use of the second person with
| _youse._ Many wince at this word and consider it uncouth and
| uneducated, but when one thinks about it, it makes sense when
| talking to a small group of friends. Seems funny really, we
| English speakers chucked out the perfectly good second-person
| (and respectable) word _thou_ and at least in some circles
| have replaced it with the uncouth _youse._ Clearly, modern
| English is missing something important by using _you_ for the
| singular and plural forms of the second person.
| t8sr wrote:
| Interesting. I learned German in Switzerland and the only
| people who ever use sie are all over 50. Everyone you meet is
| addressed as du, except maybe in formal letters.
|
| I'm wondering if some weird looks I sometimes get in Germany
| might be because of that. Is "sie" used more commonly there?
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| I remember when I was learning German seriously I switched over
| software and websites to German... and felt very uncomfortable
| that facebook would always use 'du' with me. I'm guessing it's
| some marketing "oh we're so informal and cool" marketing wank
| talk, but it grossed me out.
|
| Not sure if any native German speakers that had that reaction.
| stavros wrote:
| In contrast, in Spanish, they generally say "tu" rather than
| "usted", eg in restaurants, shops, etc. "Usted" is reserved for
| the more polite interactions, older people, etc.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" English no distinction is made between the second and third
| person 'you'."_
|
| Duh! I ought to read what I write before posing. Obviously what
| I said is garbage, what I meant was _'...in modern English no
| distinction is made between the second person singular and
| plural forms in that both use the pronoun 'you.'_
| huytersd wrote:
| "Tum" for you in Hindi when you're informal/talking to a peer.
| "Aap" for formal/elder/respected person.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| Just looked it up. Looks like Tum comes from the same root as
| English "you". Guess a few millennia can do crazy things.
| mgaunard wrote:
| you is the formal version.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| I'm from a country where there is a different version and I hate
| it because it makes me overthink every time about which one is
| appropriate to use now with people I don't know.
|
| Maybe I should completely ditch it, and use the informal one with
| everyone new, just with the hopes of building immediate rapport.
| I must not be the only one to hate it, and surely those people
| who would mind me using the informal one are not worth my time in
| the first place.
|
| Luckily we don't have gendered pronouns though, so we can avoid
| that problem altogether.
|
| I think in the end best and most scalable language is the one
| that avoids having any implications in the "you" or "pronouns".
| We are all humans after all.
| blowski wrote:
| > it makes me overthink every time about which one is
| appropriate to use now with people I don't know
|
| The issue still comes up, but in different ways. To a friend I
| might say "Where's the nearest cashpoint?", but to a stranger
| I'd say "Excuse me, but would you happen to know where I could
| find the nearest cashpoint, please".
| netsharc wrote:
| German also has the 2 levels, but addressing the police with
| the informal you might get you into trouble. There's a great
| clip (not sure if it's a sketch show or a 360p mobile phone
| recording) of a guy peeking out of his apartment door and
| seeing a lot of coos, and he says to one of them, "Piss off,
| you (informal) asshole!." . The cop says "excuse me?", and the
| guy responds with, "Ah, sorry, you (formal) asshole!". The next
| bit is the cop kicking down the door... maybe it was one of
| those Cops-style reality shows.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| That's funny. But yeah, if someone has an authority over me
| like that, I wouldn't ever dare. It's mostly a question I
| guess when speaking to people I'm doing business/service
| with.
| Aaronmacaron wrote:
| asshole is a very euphemistic translation
| derriz wrote:
| Could you explain. I'd guess "Arschloch"?
|
| The translation of "bad language" is very tricky.
|
| English is my mother tongue but I live in a German (sort-
| of, it's complicated) speaking country. I've learned that
| "scheisse" is not a very good translation for the English
| word "sh*t". It seems to me that the English word is much
| stronger/more offensive than the common German translation
| at least where I'm from.
|
| German "scheisse" seems more at the level of "damn" in my
| experience (maybe it varies according to region?) and so is
| acceptable to be used in many more situations than the
| common English translation - i.e. by young kids or with
| strangers.
|
| I think German speakers, as a result, don't realize how
| strong the English word is and use it a bit more liberally
| than would be expected. For example, I was very surprised
| that broadsheet (respectable) newspapers will casually drop
| an expression like "sh*tstorm" into a German sentence in a
| serious article.
| Aaronmacaron wrote:
| The word in question is "wichser". The dictionary says it
| means "motherfucker". In my perception wichser is one of
| the strongest insults in german.
|
| https://youtu.be/S1ZnpYEsUNs?si=nGr-2MgtBMR16dgl
| trelane wrote:
| "wichser" is like "wanker." Someone who engages in, shall
| we say, self-Stimulation. I don't think it's nearly as
| offensive as other words.
| netsharc wrote:
| Damn, my memory of the video is totally wrong...
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Words change roles, and shit is a very good contemporary
| example. Among my children's generation (mid-20s to
| mid-30s) it is now just as much as stand-in for "stuff"
| as it is an expression of anger or insult. "Where am I
| going to put all this shit?" does still carry a hint of a
| negative tone (directed towards the stuff), but barely
| any.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I got my phd in Communication and when I taught interpersonal
| communication, one of the articles we would have students read
| had an example of an American who was in Austria for a year or
| two. He was at a party talking to an Austrian friend when the
| Austrian's girlfriend came over. She stared using the informal
| "you." Later he asked her why she had decided to use the
| informal and she said, "I don't know. I just did it. You were
| talking with my boyfriend so I assumed I was on the same level
| as him."
| https://www.google.com/books/edition/Language_Shock/xOE4nPuW...
| wmil wrote:
| These days, thanks to streamers, some of the young'uns have
| started using "chat" as a fourth person plural pronoun.
| shafyy wrote:
| Also interesting: Apparently, "they" started being used as
| singular long "you" for singular: https://www.merriam-
| webster.com/wordplay/singular-nonbinary-...
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Did English ever have a formal version of "you"?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7215834 - Feb 2014 (193
| comments)
| snidane wrote:
| As someone coming from a culture with T-V distinction [1], I
| always wished we dropped one of the branches like English did in
| the past.
|
| The informal T vs formal V causes confusion in conversation with
| semi-strangers. Eg. At work you never really know which way to
| speak to someone at a watercooler. If you choose the informal T
| you make them your equal. Ehich might be perceived as insulting
| to them, since they might want to keep a perception of
| superiority to you for eg. being older, more tenured, etc. Often
| you'd rather choose not to even engage in a conversation and just
| keep your thoughts to yourself. Better than ending up in a
| inferior position when choosing the safe V, or risking insulting
| someone when using the informal T form.
|
| This felt to me like one of the reasons why English became the
| dominant language for business over time. Together with
| simplified morphology (you only need to learn the plural by
| adding 's' at the end, vs. 5+ other tenses of each word) it just
| ended up being much easier to pick up and less risky to engage in
| conversations and therefore higher chances of adoption by non-
| speakers.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%E2%80%93V_distinction
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| English became the dominant business language for reasons
| unrelated to the English language itself but because of the
| relative power of the people who spoke the language.
| softfalcon wrote:
| Yeah, I feel like people forget about that whole British
| Imperialism thing too easily.
|
| We all speak English because at one point the English
| practically owned the entire planet.
| peyton wrote:
| The competition was very aggressive, escalating into
| several Anglo-Dutch wars. The VOC absolutely outcompeted
| the EIC most of the time. How do you explain the staying
| power of English given that "imperialism" is the more
| appropriate context, not "British Imperialism"?
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Yes. But then the English language got a _lot_ of reps as the
| lingua franca of commerce and science.
| DoughnutHole wrote:
| English became the lingua franca of science because of the
| decline of German science following the world wars. English
| became the language of commerce due to the commercial
| dominance of first the British Empire and then the United
| States.
|
| So still not really due to some intrinsic merits of the
| language.
| irrational wrote:
| Don't forget about Hollywood and the dominance of English-
| speaking media. And English has been the lingua franca of
| the Internet. I travelled a bit before the mid 90s and not
| as many people spoke English in many places as do today.
| dashtiarian wrote:
| Is speaking to someone formally considered ending up in an
| inferior position in all cultures?
|
| In Persian if someone expects to be spoken with formally, they
| have to speak formally themselves. So when you speak formally
| you're kinda bringing both parties up. You can even flirt by
| speaking formally.
| blowski wrote:
| How does the "flirting by speaking formally" work? "I say,
| does Madam visit this establishment frequently".
| timeagain wrote:
| Well inferior might be overly simplistic. In many cultures
| you use formal speech with strangers as well.
| whycome wrote:
| Quebec French seems to be in the process of dropping the
| formal. It's way less common there than metro/france French.
| jraph wrote:
| Please export this to France :-)
| partiallypro wrote:
| I'm trying to learn German and though it's probably frowned upon,
| I would prefer to just use "Sie" for everything because it's less
| to remember and just simplifies so many things. I wonder if my
| ancestors had the same thoughts, which is how the formal "You"
| just took over as the only thing we really use in English.
| scotty79 wrote:
| It's weird how plural form is seen as polite.
|
| Maybe it was because if you were meeting unknown person you might
| verbally assume they are a part of some group. Either to put them
| at ease so they know they are not perceived as lonely prey or to
| safeguard yourself by communicating that you are aware and
| prepared that more of them might be hiding in the bushes.
| flint wrote:
| I'm gonna use this: "Thou art a jammy bugger!"
| lordnacho wrote:
| What a lovely Christmas present. I did not think I would ever
| write anything that ended up on the top of HN.
| peter303 wrote:
| Of course. You was formal while thou was informal.
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