In the West Midlands we have 'ya'.
Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?
131–140 of 200 posts
Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?
#132Second 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…
The "our Father" part (in English) is the problem. The consensus is that the Aramaic word used in the original (whether or not one believes that the original ever issued from the mouth of a particular person; this is linguistic rather than religious) would have been abba (transliterated, of course), which is more like "Papa" or "Dad" than "Father", at least in relatively modern usage. A familiar form of address, in other words. (Not so familiar that a little bit of flattery wouldn't be in order before asking for your allowance, etc.) How that relationship translates into pronouns varies by culture; some would maintain the more formal or respectful form even within the intimacy of the household.
Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?
#133This 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…
Any Danish speakers here? It should be even closer to English as that's where the Angles and Saxons are from.
true - many people assume small, common words come from German, until they see how much closer the (especially spoken) Danish words are.
Place with the google translate pronunciation button for some simple sentences for a while - you'll be surprised how much you understand
Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?
#134Earlier 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…
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 s…
How about Mugyo?
Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?
#135Actually there is another form of formal addressing that is more like the spanish and german: "her majesty", "his holiness" (with the equivalents in French, "son altesse", "sa sainteté"). This closes some gap between those languages, and show that there is also a remaining formal address in modern English and there are 2 in modern french.
(next time, examples of present continuous in modern french)
Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?
#136Earlier 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…
Curiously, unlike Dutch, German uses informal. "Dein Wille geschehe..."
French also uses informal. "... c'est à toi qu'appartiennent le règne"
Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
In this case acronym is not being used jargonistically, it's being used to avoid writing out "Proto-Indo-European language" and perhaps more importantly acts as a useful indicator that this is not a novel concept in the field. It is seen frequently and unambiguously in any discussion about linguistics.
I recommend you avoid throwing around accusations of laziness: if you're genuinely not aware that PIE stands for Proto-Indo-European language, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIE acts as a perfectly good source.
Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?
#138Greetings from a speaker of a linguistic oddity that doesn't have a universal form of the word "you". My native language -- Sinhalese -- has two forms: written and spoken. The written form, which has a grammar very similar to Latin, does have a universal "you", but the spoken form, which is largely grammer-less except for tense, does not. You literally cannot address someone without knowing their status/relationship…
> [...] but the spoken form, which is largely grammer-less [...] No need to deprecate your mother-tongue. I bet there's plenty of grammar, it's just different from the written form. (I see a similar inferiority complex with speakers of Singlish here in Singapore. It's a great language, if you ask me.)
And the grammar is probably a lot less obvious. The classroom experience teaches most of us to look for things like adfixes (prefixes and suffixes) and "parts of speech" and call that "grammar", but grammar is much more than that. In a language like English, for instance, stress, intonation, elision, contraction and "white space" all have grammatical significance (with rules for use that evolve over time, have dialectical variations, and are almost never taught directly). Squiggles on paper (usually) don't capture much of that.
Re: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?
#139This 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…
Interesting! I think Dutch (Mix between french, german and english) is even closer to English. I am not an expert, just thinking out loud. de -> the drie -> three (ie and ee got the same pronunciation) donder -> thunder ding -> ding daarvoor -> therefore dit -> this dat -> that donderdag -> thursday vader -> father moeder -> mother and a lot more similarities: school -> school week -> week weekend -> weekend maand ->…
Your observations of dutch being closer to English in some way than German, is correct. However, saying that Dutch is mix between German, English and French is quite wrong (disclaimer: I am not Dutch).
English, Dutch and German are all classified as western germanic languages, meaning they probably derived from a single ancestor language some time ago. Note that 'germanic' has nothing to do with German or Germany, a common misconception because the two words are similar in English.
Dutch is often more similar to English because German underwent the so called high german consonant shift (essentially changing t -> s or z, p -> pf and some others I think), in which Dutch and English didn't participate. There are some words that highlight this quite nicely:
english dutch german
appel appel apfel
plough ploeg pflug
better beter besser
toth tand zahnRe: Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?
#140Greetings from a speaker of a linguistic oddity that doesn't have a universal form of the word "you". My native language -- Sinhalese -- has two forms: written and spoken. The written form, which has a grammar very similar to Latin, does have a universal "you", but the spoken form, which is largely grammer-less except for tense, does not. You literally cannot address someone without knowing their status/relationship…
> [...] but the spoken form, which is largely grammer-less [...] No need to deprecate your mother-tongue. I bet there's plenty of grammar, it's just different from the written form. (I see a similar inferiority complex with speakers of Singlish here in Singapore. It's a great language, if you ask me.)
Why do you assume he meant it in a deprecatory (is that a word?) way? By analogy, when one says Lisp has no syntax it's not meant in a derogatory sense, on the contrary.