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Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?

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Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?

#91

Post by Ironballs »

fsck--off wrote: post #28

Second person used to be: Singular----|----Plural Thou Ye, You Thee You Thine Yours Thy Your Which correspond to the nominative, objective, and possessive cases accordingly. By the way, the "Ye" is not related to the "Ye" in store signs that say "Ye Olde...". Y was sometimes used by typographers instead of the Old English letter Þ(Thorn), which makes a "Th" sound, so those store signs should be pronounced as " The Ol…

thine is also the prevocalic possessive, "thy anvil" must be written as "thine anvil", similar to a/an.

Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?

#92

Post by mattlutze »

sabbatic13 wrote: post #67
mattlutze wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What value does abbreviation "PIE" add to a discussion for relative laymen? I'm guessing it stands for "Proto-Indo-European", a phrase I'll bet nearly no one outside advanced degree word nerds (invoked lovingly) uses or has heard. Sorry for the soapbox.

If you ever have studied comparative-historical linguistics, you know the abbreviation is frequent and necessary. So, the question is, what are the chances that someone familiar with it might use it and not even think about it? Your response assumed it was fully conscious. In any event, we're in the land of acronym pandemonium here, between CS, Data Science, Web terms, etc. PIE is a drop in a big bucket.

The point is that it's highly likely the subset of Hacker News that has studied comparitive-historical linguistics is small, and that the usage of field-specific jargon is exclusionary and obfuscatory.

I studied rhetoric and technical communication for some time, and know quite well the usefulness of field-specific terminology for initiated readers. This, however, is not a comparitive-historical linguistics symposium and, as a multidisciplinary forum, I find no reason we should not to expect commentators to write to their actual audience.

Down-vote all you like, it doesn't change the fact that jargonistic writing for general audiences is rarely necessary and most often laziness.

Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?

#93

Post by illumen »

sien wrote: post #17
jjoe wrote: post #3

We're very happy with y'all here in Texas.

Similarly in Australia we're happy with 'youse'.

I wonder if a high percentage of illiteracy in each place coincides with a high amount of alternative language forms being used?

47% of Australians are functionally illiterate - http://www.abc.net.au/local/videos/2012/09/07/3585457.htm

Illiteracy in Texas (still ranked #1 in US?) - http://www.literacytexas.org/literacy_in_texas/facts_statist...

Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?

#94

Post by simias »

davidw wrote: post #84
davedx wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. So the way we learned the Lord's Prayer, it seems to use the informal: "Thy will be done". But that doesn't correlate with addressing God as "LORD", does it? Edit: I looked this up and found this page: http://brandplucked.webs.com/theeandye.htm It seems to infer that "thou, thee" etc. are only about distinguishing between singular and plural. There's no mention of them being an informal form, at least no…

In Italian, the informal 'tu' is used. No idea why, or what the history of that is.

Same in french, in this case I think it implies that God is "part of the family" so to speak, someone very close, not a stranger.

"Vous" is formal but it doesn't necessarily mean that "tu" is informal, it just implies a certain form of intimacy.

Also, I'd like to point out that using the plural "you" as polite/formal also kind of works with plural "we" as in the "royal we": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_we

I'm not sure if both are directly related though.

Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?

#95

Post by andyjohnson0 »

gruseom wrote: post #21
bhickey wrote: post #10

Hemingway's abuse of language in For Whom the Bell Tolls always drove me. He uses you in place of tu and thou as usted .

Do you have an example? That seems like a howler that surely his editor would have caught if he didn't.

It was intentional. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls#Languag...

Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?

#96

Post by levosmetalo »

sabbatic13 wrote: post #67
mattlutze wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What value does abbreviation "PIE" add to a discussion for relative laymen? I'm guessing it stands for "Proto-Indo-European", a phrase I'll bet nearly no one outside advanced degree word nerds (invoked lovingly) uses or has heard. Sorry for the soapbox.

If you ever have studied comparative-historical linguistics, you know the abbreviation is frequent and necessary. So, the question is, what are the chances that someone familiar with it might use it and not even think about it? Your response assumed it was fully conscious. In any event, we're in the land of acronym pandemonium here, between CS, Data Science, Web terms, etc. PIE is a drop in a big bucket.

Even the ones studying linguistics on some language other than English may not necessarily be used to some random TLA, in the same way most of people in the world would have no idea which topic in schools is called PE in some north american dialect.

Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?

#97

Post by vidarh »

moskie wrote: post #39

This relates well to one of the fascinating things I realized while learning German: the fact that so many English and German words and sounds have phonetic connections, coming from their common Germanic ancestry. For example, the letter "d" in German corresponding to "th" in English: die/der/das -> the drei -> three Donner -> thunder Ding -> thing daher -> therefore and, most relevant to this discussion: du -> thou…

Mix in another Germanic language, and it gets even more fun. Take Norwegian:

"the" doesn't have a direct equivalent in modern Norwegian - we add the article as a suffix instead (a car = en bil; the car = bilen), but for the rest:

drei -> three / tre Donner -> thunder / torden Ding -> thing / ting daher -> therefore / derfor

du -> thou / du

Older Danish is even more similar to German, though I don't remember it off hand. At school, when I wanted to get my German grade up, I got a copy of Faust, which was way above my German level, and then I got hold of an old Danish translation (1920's or so). The old Danish translation was much closer to the German, so it was reasonably easy to figure out how they corresponded, yet still close enough to modern Danish (and by extension Norwegian) that I could read it fairly quickly when I couldn't figure out the German.

And if you really want to see close relationship between German and English, read some Dutch. Dutch to me reads like German and English lightly mixed, with some other random letters thrown in.

Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?

#98

Post by nisse72 »

ptr wrote: post #58
nisse72 wrote: post #44

Swedish has du (singular) and ni (plural). Prior to the "du-reform" in the late 1960's however, ni was also used as a formal singular form, but for the last 40 or so years the formal form has been dropped, leaving ni for plural only. In fact many older people would find it mildly insulting to be addressed singular ni today. Of course there are a few exceptions, most notably when addressing members of the royal family…

Could this be dialectal? Because I hear "ni" now and then, and I've also found myself using it a couple of times -- not through intent, but rather automatically. Maybe it's the "new trend" you're talking about.

Maybe it's a central Stockholm thing, I don't really know. And I certainly didn't mean to imply that it was common, I only noticed it now and then and vaguely recall some mention of it on P1 Språket or in the newspaper, that it seemed to be making a return.

I've only ever known du, would never use ni except for a group, and feel odd being called ni myself. Not insulted mind you, closest I can describe it is like when a small child refers to you as "that man" but you're only 16 or 17. :)

Ok, did some googling...

This from P1 Språket says that it wasn't a trend in 2004 (but then why were they asking?): http://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=411&arti...

And this blog from 2008, in response to a column in DN that I can't find in their archive: http://lingvistbloggen.ling.su.se/?p=352

And finally this in DN from 2013: http://www.dn.se/insidan/fjask-eller-respekt-ar-du-pa-vag-at...

So trend or not, it certainly seems to be a recurring topic of discussion in Sweden!

Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?

#99

Post by userulluipeste »

fsck--off wrote: post #28

Second person used to be: Singular----|----Plural Thou Ye, You Thee You Thine Yours Thy Your Which correspond to the nominative, objective, and possessive cases accordingly. By the way, the "Ye" is not related to the "Ye" in store signs that say "Ye Olde...". Y was sometimes used by typographers instead of the Old English letter Þ(Thorn), which makes a "Th" sound, so those store signs should be pronounced as " The Ol…

"Thee" is actually "to you" or "for you".

(I thought I knew less English than I actually do!)

Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?

#100

Post by SiVal »

davedx wrote: post #54
fsck--off wrote: post #28

Second person used to be: Singular----|----Plural Thou Ye, You Thee You Thine Yours Thy Your Which correspond to the nominative, objective, and possessive cases accordingly. By the way, the "Ye" is not related to the "Ye" in store signs that say "Ye Olde...". Y was sometimes used by typographers instead of the Old English letter Þ(Thorn), which makes a "Th" sound, so those store signs should be pronounced as " The Ol…

Interesting. So the way we learned the Lord's Prayer, it seems to use the informal: "Thy will be done". But that doesn't correlate with addressing God as "LORD", does it? Edit: I looked this up and found this page: http://brandplucked.webs.com/theeandye.htm It seems to infer that "thou, thee" etc. are only about distinguishing between singular and plural. There's no mention of them being an informal form, at least no…

Korean has many grades of "you" that can manipulate politeness and formality somewhat independently. Most younger people in Seoul today would speak to a stranger using a grammatical register that is both informal and polite. It communicates the idea that we can be "at ease" instead of at attention with each other, but we're not going to be presumptuous about being old buddies. We'll be casual, yet polite.

But I was surprised to hear people addressing God in a Christian prayer using a form of you that is both more formal than the form I described above (no surprise so far), yet less polite (there's the surprise.) It's not an impolite form, just a form that makes it clear in a formal ("at attention") setting that you are speaking to a peer, not a superior.

Korean honorifics were puzzling enough to me without this mystery, and it was only later that I discovered that Western languages that still distinguish between a simple formal and informal you seem to always choose the latter.

I've always speculated that the Korean pronoun choice is a result of translating the Western practice to Korean. I've never been able to test that, though, because older Korean religions such as Buddhism don't talk directly to any deities (that I've ever witnesses, anyway), so there isn't any form of "you" used at all.

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