211–220 of 441 posts
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.
And my favorite one (in UK): Governor!
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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.
Compare English with Esperanto, which, in spite of being much easier to learn than English, still hasn't become anywhere near as widespread (at least in terms of number of speakers). Ironically the one biggest thing which presents an ideological advantage for Esperanto is that it's native to no nation, so all the people who speak it are closer to being equals in that regard; yet it is the imperialism and a large numb…
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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.
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 th…
Slovene has three levels of politeness: * ti (second person singular) * vi (second person plural) * oni (third person plural) -- archaic
The same happened with Portuguese in Brazil, 'Vós Mercês', which is formal, is used throughout the country as (simplified) 'você'. And the informal form, 'tu', is rarely used (only in the South).
"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.
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 "þū".
So they drop the Você but still use the formal verb conjugation.
Navigating cultural language rules can be hard...
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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.
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.
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Quebec French seems to be in the process of dropping the formal. It’s way less common there than metro/france French.
This so untrue I had to make an account to reply to you. Quebec french is standardised by the OQLF (Office Québécois de la Langue Française) and the formal/informal distinction is as important in our french as it is in other cultures. The reason it might seem less common is because most conversations people have are informal. In formal settings, it is still expected of people to use "vous" rather than "tu". It is see…
In spoken French, in cases of unfamiliarity it would be more common in France to use the formal “vous” than in a place like Montreal where you’ll see “tu” still used.
When I say it “seems to be in the process” it’s because of how I’ve heard the language spoken. (Admittedly in Montreal and French Ontario and not other parts of Quebec).
Popular French (from France!) YouTuber Loïc Suberville actually notes this difference in a video a couple weeks ago (jump to 1:25 ish).
It’s something he noticed as a “metro French” speaker. And he’s made a career now out of looking at the absurdities of spoken language.
(https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PzNHyk2JAas&t=83s)
Yes there is an official “language board” but that’s aspirational and not a law. Language is a reflection of how people use it.
I agree that in a formal conversation people will use “vous” (and we see similar splits of language in English “on the news” vs what people actually use), but there’s way less use of “vous” in Quebec for a lot of situations.