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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.
How does the “flirting by speaking formally” work? “I say, does Madam visit this establishment frequently”.
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 “Þ” 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 t…
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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.
That's not universally true. In my country, German was the widely accepted and taught second language until WW2. Since then it's been English.
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 wa…
I don't think that has much to do with it. I think it has more to do with the dominant political and economic position of the United States. French served a similar role in the past despite having all the features you describe.
> This explains a peculiarity of traditional Quaker speech, which one often hears in films set in the early Americas. The Quakers opposed making any distinctions of rank, so they insisted on addressing everyone as thou, not as you. The irony is that today we perceive thou to be archaic and formal, while the original intent is to be more informal. In german, the distinction between formal and informal address is disap…
What I mean to say is, if the language is on the whole not the language of the nobility, even the formal pronouns would not be perceived as elevated, really. If you really wanted to impress, you'd switch to French (or even Latin, etc.)
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 wa…
Is it culturally English speaking to think this just sounds like social anxiety rather than an expected norm? If someone thought they were superior than me and expected a particular greeting or whatever, I'd tell them where to shove it lol We are all equal.
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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.
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”?
In the 19th and early 20th century the British owned the seas, a post 1945 another English speaking country has - the United States.
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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 Norw…
/me native brit I was raised with the KJV and Shakespeare. To me, that language is definitely "modern english"; it doesn't need translating, any more than Scouse needs translating. I have a completely different relationship with Chaucer. But it's like reading a foreign language that I know, but not idiomatically; I can't be sure whether X is supposed to be sarcastic, or Y is meant to be as funny as it seems. Beowulf…
Our language has been heavily heavily influenced in the interim first by Old Norse/Danish and then (a huge amount) by Norman French.
I actually have an easier time with Anglo-Saxon than Chaucer, personally. Middle English has bizarre inconsistent orthography, and is full of French loans. While written Anglo-Saxon is pretty consistent and some of the vocabulary and grammar makes sense to me as someone who studied German a bit. Old English is a really beautiful language.
But in general what we have in written records is what was written by the literate elites, not regular folk. So it's really hard to say what it would be like to be dropped into the villages of 15th century England.
'Thou' is also used in English prayers ('Thy kingdom come, thy will be done'), as a mark of a personal closeness to God.
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 implic…
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Also see, the sun also rises because hemmingway transliterated a ton of Spanish, including thees, thous, some colloquialisms
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 "tú".