Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

english.stackexchange.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 200 posts

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

#121

Post by eitland »

nicholas73 wrote: post #113
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…

Any Danish speakers here? It should be even closer to English as that's where the Angles and Saxons are from.

I'm pretty sure there are, at least I think I see Norwegians all the time : )

When you know Norwegian or Danish you can see a lot of similarities. The explanation I got was that around year 1000 Norway/Denmark was pretty much a naval superpower.

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

#122

Post by eitland »

kristiandupont wrote: post #73
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…

In Spanish and French, hora or heure means hour , but it also means time . If you go north, to Germany, uhr means o'clock , and watch/clock . Further north, in Scandinavia, ur simply means watch/clock , whereas time means hour . It's quite fascinating and gives you a sense how information and knowledge spread in ancient times.

Be aware that Norwegians pronounce i something like a long 'ee' in English so tiem in Norwegian is pronounced very different from time in English.

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

#123

Post by mnw21cam »

pietro wrote: post #69
tikwidd wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the result of the High German Consonant Shift [1]. English - many accents, at least - retain the dental fricatives (th-sounds) that were shifted to alveolar stops (d and t sounds) in High German. Dental fricatives are relatively rare sounds among the world's languages. Icelandic and European Spanish are the only languages I can think of that have dental fricative phonemes. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi…

There are a few other languages with dental fricatives, including Arabic, Danish and Greek.

Shibboleth. (Hebrew, apparently).

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

#124

Post by cron »

tunesmith wrote: post #64
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…

Cool. Singular: Thou would like Bob to give thee thy ball. It is thine, and then thou will feel good about thyself. Plural: Ye would like Bob to give you your ball. it is yours, and then ye will feel good about yourselves. Not really sure how to ask "Are you okay?" of a singular person, though...

In Ireland it's fairly common for people to use "you" as the singular and "ye" as the plural. It's less ambiguous but definitely not considered proper.

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

#125

Post by chanux »

merkitt wrote: post #65

Greetings 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…

There's no way to informally address a superior without a salutation or a name.

I have always found this really annoying.

Male friends of roughly equal age tend to call each other "machang"

It's interesting how the subsequent 'you' turn 'umba'.

Dude, you didn't tell me about the class.

The 'you' there is usually turned in to umba.

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

#126

Post by chanux »

eru wrote: post #108
merkitt wrote: post #65

Greetings 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.)

Fun fact: The mix of Sinhalese - English is called Singlish here.

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

#128

Post by vidarh »

eitland wrote: post #121
nicholas73 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any Danish speakers here? It should be even closer to English as that's where the Angles and Saxons are from.

I'm pretty sure there are, at least I think I see Norwegians all the time : ) When you know Norwegian or Danish you can see a lot of similarities. The explanation I got was that around year 1000 Norway/Denmark was pretty much a naval superpower.

It's actually more recent. From the mid 1300's the Norwegian and Danish monarchy merged through marriage, and Denmark became by far the dominant party in the union. (Schelswig-Holsten was also for some time part of

The union lasted until 1814, when Denmark (and by extension Norway) had supported Napoleon, and Sweden had joined the other side. Sweden got Norway as a "price". But during that period, a lot of people had started preparing for an attempt at Norwegian independence. And while we entered into a looser union with Sweden, there was a long ongoing debate about creating a new, formalised Norwegian language.

We ended up with two, but one of them - bokmål - was basically Danish + Norwegian pronunciation + various spelling reforms, as this was effectively what was spoken amongst the upper classes in the cities, and this (with further spelling reforms) is the dominant written language today (the other was based on spoken dialects, and is further from Danish but not that much) .

So we've "only" had about 200 years for the languages to diverge again.

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

#129

Post by levosmetalo »

xbadxapple wrote: post #90
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…

It was a whatthehell moment for me too. I started learning German a bit later than English (we had to learn 2 foreign languages at school). Pronunciation exercises brought the epiphany here, haha. Was strange at first but then we thought - hell, after all, these languages have much in common going back some centuries. God but I hated pronouncing the umlauts.

> God but I hated pronouncing the umlauts.

How comes you hate pronouncing umlauts and don't hate these various sorts of t-th-d sound? As in think-tank-they-did?

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

#130

Post by Zenst »

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…

That seems fair, and actualy logical from the persective that `god` is above all and with that has his own introductionary terms of reference. That said the English language has many logical traps and pitfalls with its exceptions to rules. You can even say religion defies logic in many ways. So to have a logical reference to religion via `lord` not only makes logical sense, in a language with logical exceptions in reference to a subject with logical exceptions. Guess two negatives do make a positive. That all said "praise be" still seems odd as no reference towards what is praised is indicated.

But I do love the thy, thee,thine olde English, has period character and if you use those terms, or indeed any term that is out of fashion in todays evolving languages. Well you either seem educated or odd by others in general. Though word racisim comes in many forms.

Post reply on HN