I think Thee would be for family, friends, or someone of equal social status and thou is more formal (but much less used now - only as tha: “tha's gonna get it“).
Old Yorkshire phrase for telling children to mind who they address as 'thee / tha': "Don't thee tha them as thas thee" - kind of a similar sense as 'mind your Ps and Qs'.
I feel like this must be fading because I lived in North Yorkshire for almost 5 years and never heard a thee/thou used. On the other hand, English dialects are hyper localized so there might be villages where it is normal.
You're more likely thinking of Quakers. At least those still a part of the mid-Atlantic tradition historically use "thou" to avoid power distinctions. Not many still do this in daily speech, but it's not absolutely lost, and is sometimes used for emphasis in a conversation in which matters of power and equality are lurking.
I definitely heard it more from my Grandfather, but I still hear it here in South Yorkshire. It seems to be most often used in common phrases, such as "What's tha want for tha tea?" or "What's tha doing?" (tha = thou/thy), or used for emphasis ("I'll tell thee what"), rather than as a general alternative though.
> English dialects are hyper localized
On a vaguely related note, has anyone else (particularly in Yorkshire) use "seef"/"seefing" to mean "see if"/"seeing if" (as in "I was seefing/seeing if it was in the car")? I hear it all the time from my immediate family, but I've never been able to find it referenced beyond that.
It is fading, and it hasn't been in widespread use for quite some time. However when I was in the UK, I definitely heard "tha" and "thissen" (yourself) on numerous occasions, mostly in common idioms and phrases, in South Yorkshire, especially around Barnsley and Rotherham. I don't think I ever heard it in major metropolitan areas like Manchester or Liverpool though.
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 this point. English language works older than Shakespeare such as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Beowulf are pretty much always read in translation.
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 Norwegian today, despite both being evolved directly from Old Norwegian, because both places were originally settled by Norwegian vikings.
Shakepeare is essentially just very old school, yet still Modern English. This still feels within the realm of understanding of current day native speakers equipped with a good dictionary.
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 is some thing else again. That definitely seems to me like a foreign language.
I suspect actual spoken Anglo-Saxon (as by the common people, not the nobility) would probably more easily understood by a modern Dutch, Frisian, or Low German speaker than by a modern English speaker.
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.
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 thought.
I would recommend consulting Prokosh Comparative Germanic Grammar.
It’s a very old reference and may not be online, but what my germanic linguistics professor used with us Germanic linguistics grad students. He was a world renowned expert on the various futhark versions.
I'm not huge on taking the Wikipedia entry at face value and prefer to look at the references used for the entry. In this case the reference CHAPTER 25 TYPOGRAPHY AND THE PRINTED ENGLISH TEXT, page 6, does mention that y/ye was used in place of both eth and thorn.
The eth/thorn distinction was fairly arbitrary in actual written Old English, with thorn being more common. The modern distinction between eth and thorn being based off of voice originated in Icelandic, I think? That's the only language that still uses them in its modern form, anyways.
I admit I'm only going off of Wikipedia, but that claims (in the "Old Norse" article) that extant writings from that period used thorn exclusively, and again the use of thorn and eth as the unvoiced and voiced variants is a relatively modern convention.
Your first unicode character won't render in Windows.
þ?
I can see it is LATIN SMALL LETTER Y + COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER S .. not sure what that ligature is, though. My knowledge of old English is very lacking :)
From Middle English you, yow, ȝow (object case of ye), from Old English ēow (“you”, dative case of ġē), from Proto-Germanic iwwiz (“you”, dative case of jīz), Western form of izwiz (“you”, dative case of jūz), from Proto-Indo-European yūs (“you”, plural), yū́.
Gutenbergs printing press was the mid 15th century, well into the Middle English era.
I went to school in the 90's with a wonderful person who grew up Lancaster Quaker and regularly had to suppress speaking to Professors with Thou and Thine. Lost the habit really quickly, but it was charming and very real.
Dutch is similar with “U” being both singular and plural. Verb conjugation is the same for both cases.
This has been interesting as an English speaker learning Dutch! Luckily I never really latched on to sms-speak but I can imagine some cohorts of English speakers have to break the habit of reading “u” as shorthand for the the full word.
This lead me down a short Wikipedia rabbit-hole that is quite interesting (at least to me).
Apparently Dutch originally had "du" as 2nd person singular and "gij" as 2nd person plural. From the 16th century, "gij" started being used as singular polite form. (Possibly under the influence of Latin and French.) Later, "du" disappeared. Up to this point, the progression is similar to English.
"gij" then transformed to "jij" in the northern part of the Dutch language area and in written language; while it remained "gij" in Flemish spoken language.
However, then in the 17th century people started using "Uwe Edelheit" ("Your Nobility") as a new formal form in letters. This evolved into the current formal pronoun "u".
(Note also that the accusative form of "gij" is also "u", but is not related to the formal "u".)
Native Dutch speaker here. These days one doesn't capitalise the "u" except at the start of a sentence, however in older texts (40+ years?) it was usual to see the "U" pronoun capitalised at all times. Sorry if I'm mansplaining but I noticed you capitalising it and thought I'd point it out, because it would stand out to a modern Dutch reader.
As for sms-speak, I'd be flabbergasted if you encountered the u-form anywhere in text messages except maybe in automated OTP messages from your bank. So I would guess that's something you needn't worry about :).
Good luck in your language-learning journey. Assuming you're living in the Netherlands, I'm curious as to how your integration is going? My observation is that Dutch culture can be insanely hard for foreigners to get a foothold in, partly because of the "polite" tendency of most locals to insist on speaking English around non-native Dutch. I feel like that gesture, which may seem accommodating on the surface level, can almost be an exclusionary dynamic in itself.
Hey! I think you created an account just to reply to comment. That's cool!
Appreciate the spelling tip. I make a lot of mistakes writing in Dutch as it is. I would likely keep doing that by instinct until someone told me.
I am in the Netherlands for just over a year now. I live in a small village near the Belgian border and work in Eindhoven. I've actually found my neighbors and coworkers very accommodating towards my efforts to learn your language. I've taken 90 hours of lessons in about 9 months, which made me more confident to push people more and challenge myself. At my job, I try not to speak English for social situations, although all of our work is done in English due to remote workers in other countries.
Although I've had a good experience, I can see how some less assertive immigrants might not feel empowered to ask others honor their social requests. There have been times that I asked for something in Dutch, and without any hesitation, the attendant or store worker responded to my request in English. That stings a bit, but it stings for my ego because it doesn't usually happen. Many Dutch people in my daily life ask me to repeat myself, but they don't automatically make an assumption about my preferences and instead rely on the clues of the conversation to guide their responses. All of this is also dependent on the situation, eg. for work tasks, I speak English, because miscommunication is not an option.
If someone is reading this also as a new NL immigrant, I would say you should be assertive and ask a little on your path to find friends. It's okay to make friends in one language and transition to another if you both speak it. Shopping should be done in Dutch, read the Dutch newspaper, etc etc. Put in the effort and many Dutchmen will respect that. Habit might let their tongue slip, but kindly and firmly remind them, and they'll go back.
For Dutchies, I would say that that it's probably worth the effort to make a friend. If not, consider it the new normal for politeness. Just try to keep going in the same language until visible confusion or a blocking of progress in the conversation.
If you don't mind, I'd love if you reached out and sent me an email! I'd love to keep chatting about it. Address is in my profile.
This is why the British and people in the US do not act the same. The British have their behaviour while us Americans have our behavior. Totally different.
In a German sentence a change in capitalization of Sie can very well turn a "formal you" (Sie) into a more general "them" (sie). So it is not just spelling, although it is a very common mistake.
This is a minor distinction to make it clear in writing, same as De vs de in Norwegian, and several other languages. It's a common way of turning a plural into a formal address.
Incidentally, in Norwegian the formal form is now so archaic that short of communicating very formally with a very old person, in most cases it will come across as rude and sarcastic (you're implying someone is seriously up themselves)
The same is in italian “lei”, except during fascism where they introduced as a formal way to address someone as “voi” which would be the plural of “tu”/“voi”
Afaik it was because the “Lei” was considered elitist and because in the roman latin culture they had only the “tu” up to caesar introduced the “voi”, so maybe you know fascists had some sort of fetish for the roman empire so they chose to bring the culture as close as possible closer to what roman culture was
Caesar didn't "introduce the voi". Is this an urban myth that Italians believe? The tu/vous distinction in Romance languages arose in medieval times. Not only did it not exist in Caesar's time, it is absent from the centuries of Imperial-era literature in Latin.
There is a wide literature on Latin forms of address. Eleanor Dickey's monograph published by Oxford University Press is a good survey.
I am not an historian but it seems so, I’ve found in the past few minutes two sources that attribute Voi to romans, its in italian but sure it can be translated, going to paste the original links unaltered
Your first link backs up exactly what I mentioned above:
> In antichità, quando si parlava latino, le formule di cortesia non esistevano … L’usanza del Voi nasce insieme a una nuova formula politica: la tetrarchia introdotta nel 293 da Diocleziano.
It was an innovation in Romance that took place centuries after Caesar and most of the Imperial era. Again, there is ample scholarly literature on this, so no need to resort to popular references like encyclopedias.
Yeah I saw that, but I'd say if that makes sense, that they're attributing the introduction of "Voi" within the roman era and not in the medieval times, right? The second one instead attributes it to "Roma Cesarea", to be fair, it is not the encyclopaedia that attributes it to "Roma Cesarea" but the article that influenced Mussolini quoted on the article on the encyclopaedia, so they're probably only quoting, but I don't know enough, so I'd trust you're right, thank you
Historians today tend to trace the ultimate fall of the Roman Empire to the multiple crises of the third century, even if the name of the empire limped on for a couple of centuries more. So AD 293 is quite a late date, on the threshold to a new era. From the viewpoint of modern historians, it is hard to understand how Italian Fascism could have seen anything that late as worth being proud of and emulating.
The Western Empire was the only Roman Empire that the Italian Fascists ever really cared about. Early Byzantium was totally foreign to their mythology.
It makes sense to me: high ranking people often have conversations which are on the behalf (or at least implicate the future) of large groups of people. Thus a plural formal second person, as well as the "royal we".
(note that english aristocrats were often spoken of, not by given [or if they had one, family] name, but by the geographical entity that was the basis of their nobility)
Not only is "you" the formal, polite plural form, but calling someone "thou" was also seen as so informal as to be rude (in verb form, to "thou" someone). This has a modern equivalent in the term "tutoyer" in French.
An interesting counterpoint is the usage in Japanese of sarcastically polite forms like お前 and 貴様, where you use a pronoun with a surface meaning of extreme respect, as a form of insult.
Shipmate is used to describe someone who you crew a ship with, such as in the navy, and is supposed to convey comradery.
E xcept in its real world use, where its the social equivalent of referring to someone as "s**head".
Interesting. I wonder if the similarity of the words "ship" and "shit" contributed to the development. Out of curiosity, what is the non-pejorative replacement for shipmate?
Just common english slang, bro, dude, whatevers on their nametag or a first name/nickname if they have one; nothing dissimilar to civilian life and I think thats largely the point, even last names are commonly referred to as "slave names". Formal speech is all ranks, "hey chief", "yes petty officer".
The US south still uses ma’am and sir as polite forms of address, but it’s also often used sarcastically (where the ma’am or sir is exaggerated: “Well, yes, MA’am!”)
Interestingly the formality ladder flips at the very top of the hierarchy. Kings and popes must be addressed diffusely with plurals and layered references to official status (“Your Imperial Majesty”), but the Christian God above them is a “thou” in every European language.
(Useless trivia bit… Apparently Emperor Charles V invented the styling of “His Majesty”. Before him, kings and emperors were addressed as highnesses, but he wanted something fancier after being crowned as the Holy Roman Emperor in addition to the kingships he already held.)
(but the way I heard the joke is that the scientist has planned to ask Him how to resolve gravitation with quantum mechanics, and only then the bystanders inquire, why not ask about turbulence?)
There seems to be a certain amount of "euphemism treadmill" in Japanese pronouns, where they start off polite and drift downward in acceptability to be replaced by new ones. I have a grammar book from 1906 ("Hossfeld’s Japanese Grammar") which effectively documents some of that drift: for second person pronouns, apparently you could still get away with “addressing inferiors familiarly” with ‘kisama’ in 1906, so it hadn't yet dropped to the insult level it has now. ‘nushi’ is also listed, glossed ‘contemptuous’, and I don't think anybody uses 'nushi' as an insult today. ‘Anata’ and ‘omae’ are the 1906 recommended pronouns.
Korean also suffers from similar issues, where it's a bit more ridiculous: the textbook version of "polite" 2nd singular pronoun ("dangsin") has fallen so low that it's pretty much an insult now, and no other term has taken its place. As a result, modern Korean arguably does not have a polite 2nd person singular pronoun.
We somehow make do - it helps that Korean allows just omitting pronoun when the context is clear (same as Japanese).
主(nushi) has wrapped back around to being more on the polite side, though I get the impression it's used more by older people. There's also phrases like 持ち主(mochi-nushi -- person who is a holder of something) that have ossified the pronoun so it probably won't go away entirely for a while.
I think the reason for the rotation of pronouns is because people start using them sarcastically which means it's no longer seen as respectful, and so new pronouns become necessary.
The page also gets into the plural form being used for the singular over time (as is increasingly the case with English, at least in the US, when you want to avoid specifying a masculine or feminine third-person singular).
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 implicitly refer to multiple people (sort of like the royal We), which obviously wouldn't be acceptable in Christianity.
Good insight that I hadn't thought of. To flesh that out, the KJV translators used thou as singular and ye as plural consistently to render the second person singular-plural distinctions found in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. The translators never intended a usage of thou in the KJV to imply informality, only that the original language used the second person singular. That would naturally carry over into prayers and hymns that don't come from the KJV Bible. However, common people at the time who couldn't know the translators' chosen convention might have then read closeness into the pronoun used to address God, which wouldn't be a bad thing theologically.
This should be common knowledge for native English speakers. It's hard to read Shakespeare without knowing this. But for non-native speaker, this would be mysterious.
Note that "you" is actually the object form, so the table is unfortunately not arranged the obvious way:
single plural used in contexts of
thou ye nominative (subject), vocative (preceded by the word "O"). For the singular, this implies that the relevant verb takes the "-[e]st" suffix.
thee you all object forms (direct object, indirect object, object of preposition)
thy your possessive determiner, before consonant sounds - thy will, thy God
thine your possessive determiner, before vowel sounds (including 'h') - thine enemy, thine head
thine yours possessive pronoun - not my will but thine, all that I have is thine
(the last distinction used to by used for my/mine, and is still used for a/an)
Why do you think the KJV is the "original translation"? As far as English translations of Scripture go, it was preceded by the Wycliffe Bible. And a translation of the Gospels was produced in the Old English era.
While technically true this is somewhat pedantic, the KJV was the first vernacular translation to be widely available in the English speaking world and is a hugely influential text for literary English, so just take "original" here in a metaphoric sense.
Because there are many still-popular and important literary works like those of Shakespeare and the King James Bible which benefit from understanding the distinction.
For most of my life I've quietly despised the people in the church of my youth for switching to thee/thou/thy in public prayers. I always thought this was grandstanding performance of piety, or cargo cult mumbo jumbo, or both.
It just seemed so silly to think that God only understands archaic English.
Now it turns out these people I despised were only being respectful, and trying to use the formal forms?
However, since it seems that "thee" and "thou" were actually the informal forms of "you" in 17th century English, now I'm really confused why they suddenly started talking this way the moment they crossed the threshold of the church.
As far as I know, you actually is the formal, originally plural version (ye/you/your) and thou was the informal version (thou/thee/thy/thine). Over time, thou became impolitely informal and is now no longer used, though interestingly enough, nowadays it might even be perceived as more formal than you because it's archaic and survives almost exclusively in liturgical language.
In Old English "thou" is singular, "you" is plural.
As noted in Wikipedia:
> As William Tyndale translated the Bible into English in the early 16th century, he preserved the singular and plural distinctions that he found in his Hebrew and Greek originals. He used thou for the singular and ye for the plural regardless of the relative status of the speaker and the addressee. Tyndale's usage was standard for the period and mirrored that found in the earlier Wycliffe's Bible and the later King James Bible.
Later, presumably due to French influence, "thou" became informal and "you" formal.
Finally "thou" was dropped from everyday speech, though it still shows up in various old phrases.
In ancient Hebrew and ancient Greek, there was no T/V distinction, so their equivalent of "thou" was never considered informal. Some Early Modern translators of the bible tried to preserve the thou/you distinction as it existed in ancient Hebrew and ancient Greek, while deliberately ignoring how it worked in the languages they were translating into. This then influenced the language of prayer.
Another pattern is that religious language tends to be archaic. For example, Jews pray in ancient Hebrew, Muslims in classical Arabic, some Catholics in classical Latin, and so on. I don't know whether this is done to create a sense of awe and mystery, or because religions try to appear unchanging.
The Goblin Emperor by Sarah Monette (writing as Katherine Addison) is a secondary world fantasy that uses you/thou as a way of incorporating formality. It's interesting way of helping understand the whole manner/formality system of the setting.
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".
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.
In my native Texan English, "y'all" can certainly act as a singular polite "you" (EDIT: though it is not terribly common). I often use "Howdy, how y'all doin?" as a polite greeting to people I don't know regardless of the number of people I am addressing, though switch to just "you" after making acquaintance. Funny enough, "howdy" is a contraction of the older "how do ye" and some people still consider it both a greeting _and_ an inquiry, so in some cases it's redundant, and others it isn't, depending on the listener.
That’s interesting. As a non-Texan, I’d assumed that since y’all is a contraction that it would signify a more casual tone in the same way that “He’ll” is less formal than “He will”, etc.
"y'all" - explicitly addressing 1 person while implicitly addressing >1 people. I might say "how y'all doin" to a friend, implying "how are you and your family doing"
"all y'all" - >>1 person or addressing >1 person that was not included in the previous "y'all"
"y'all" - explicitly and implicitly addressing 1 person whom I have not made acquaintance with. If I were working as a server in a restaurant and had a single person come in, I may address them with "y'all". "What can I get y'all?" is the same as "what can I get you?" but the "y'all" gives it some extra politeness or an "emphatic southern accent"
This often comes up in such discussions, but no, both "y'all" and "all y'all" are plural. They're useful for distinguishing between smaller and larger groups. For instance, if a couple of members of a family are visiting, you could say "you" (the person you're speaking to), "y'all" (the whole group visiting), or "all y'all" (you and the rest of your family who aren't here). Or if multiple groups are visiting, "y'all" might be one group and "all y'all" might be everyone.
Interesting on the “y’all”. I’m a Texan and have never addressed a singular person as y’all. If I do address a person as y’all as in “How are y’all doing?”, it’s assumed I’m speaking of the family unit that person belongs to rather than the individual.
While we Texans might find it polite or friendly, in the corporate world I’ve been told to avoid using it in emails.
I think you're right about the implicit group/family aspect in many cases. If I'm taking to one friend and say "how are y'all doing" then that friend's family or ingroup is certainly implied in the question.
The singular polite "y'all" I'm referring to is generally used when the other party is not known. F.ex. I regularly, though certainly not always, hear clerks, waiters, or other service industry workers using "y'all" singularly when asking "what can I get y'all to eat" or "y'all need anything else" when speaking to exactly one person, and I use it that way myself.
> it’s assumed I’m speaking of the family unit that person belongs to rather than the individual.
I think this is the formal singular "y'all" that people keep referring to. It can sometimes be short for "you and your family," which is why you would see it in greetings and goodbyes e.g. "How are y'all doing today" or "I hope to see y'all again soon."
For signs of formality, it has the indirection of not addressing the person directly (like "your grace" "your honor" or "your mercy"), and is usually used as an stylized expression of concern. To my ear, "How was y'all's holidays?" sounds really professional, like how your lawyer would start a meeting.
I'm from the Northeast and once in a while I'll use "y'all" as an informal plural. It tends to bring a smile to the people being addressed. Perhaps it is understood as a reference to its use in the movies.
Re. “howdy”, in (somewhat old-fashioned) posh English speech, “how d’you do?” as a greeting is not an enquiry: the idiomatic response is to say “how d’you do” in return. Weird.
It’s just like Southwestern Brazilian Portuguese uses “você” as the informal second person singular, while ironically the origin of this word is the formal version of this pronoun. Currently the formal second person singular is actually a third-person pronoun, “o senhor” or “a senhora” depending on the gender. Although there is incredible differences in how the formal/informal pronouns are applied: in my family we were taught to only use the informal with everybody no matter what, and in some of my friends’ families the practice is to use the formal even when addressing one’s parents.
There must be some links between French and English where in French, the formal version is "vous" which sounds like "you" and the informal is "toi" which maybe sounded like "thou" in the past. (The 'th' has no equivalent in French)
Yes. The tu and thou pronouns are related. So are me and moi, nos and ours. In Hindi me and you are mai and tu. In Russian they are menya and tubya. (Sorry for errors in transliteration.). English I and Fench je are related too. Old English ich and Latin ego make the link more obvious.
Pronouns tend to be some of the most fixed words in a language, up there with numbers and basic words like for "water" or "mother". They undergo sound change, and shifts like how English lost thou, but they are almost never replaced wholesale.
All those languages are in fact descended from a common language spoken several thousand years ago. About half of the world today speaks a language in the Indo-European language family.
The English T-V distinction seems to have originated after the Norman Conquest, where French became the language of the aristocracy; wouldn't be surprised if that was exactly the source.
French and English coexisted as neighbor languages for more than a millenium, so there are a lot of both subtle and obvious similarities between the two.
That's because they're very closely related languages. English is a mix of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French, after the Norman invasion of England in the 11th century. Norman French is how the Norse diaspora in Normandy mixed their Germanic tongue with the local dialects of Latin. And the Romance and Germanic languages are both pretty closely related branches of Indo-European, which is also a pretty narrow language family to start with. For example, 'tu' from French comes from mixing Norse 'du' with Latin 'tuus'...both of which come from deeper roots. Proto Indo-European reconstructs this as 'tuH'.
There's no need to explain French tu by looking at Germanic languages. It descends pretty uneventfully from Latin tū. However, French and Latin tu are cousins of German du and English thou.
There’s a part in Hamlet where Claudius (Hamlet’s uncle, the one who killed Hamlet’s father and married his mother Gertrude and became king) tells Gertrude, “go talk to your son” after Hamlet angers him. Note that it’s not “our son” or even “thy son”—the choice of “you” here is really biting once you know the distinction.
There is a scene in The Lord of the Rings (Book) where Éowyn switches to using "thou" and "thee" when begging Aragorn to take her with him when he takes the Paths of the Dead.
If you don't know (as I didn't for a long time) that she has switched to intimate/informal language then the scene has less impact. Especially since Aragorn keeps things formal in his reply.
This is a very common misinterpretation. A major factor behind such misinterpretation is probably the King James Bible. It heavily influences our sense of style even today. God is traditionally addressed with thou due to the intimate relationship, and today this is often misinterpreted as formal style. E.g.
> Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.
This is very noticeable in the Athrabeth, where Finrod switches between "you" and "thou" when talking to Andreth throughout the conversation.
Tolkien also talks in Appendix F of The Return of the King about how hobbits had largely lost the distinction between "you" and "thou" - so when Pippin speaks to Denethor in Minas Tirith and addresses him with the familial term, people assume that he must be royalty himself to address the Steward in such an informal manner.
Afterthought: the post below illustrates the paucity of modern English in that nowadays in modern English no distinction is made between the second and third person 'you' whereas in other languages such as German it still is.
__
I've mentioned on HN previously when discussing languages that when my father was learning German his old textbook had the English thee, thou, and thine/thy as the second person for the German second person du.
One of the faux pas for English speakers when learning German is the incorrect usage of du. They mistakenly use du instead of sie because it's more informal than sie not realizing that in German it is reserved for the closest of relationships such as family, lovers etc.
Essentially, in German du — the equivalent form of the second person English thou — is still a part of the living language whereas in English thou is now archaic.
The correct usage of du became immediately obvious to me after seeing my father's textbook. For the life of me I cannot understand why modern English textbooks simply substitute you for du, it's just crazy as it leads to much confusion.
Thou and variants are understood by most native English speakers even if the term is now archaic so it makes sense to use it instead of you in textbooks for learning German. Just one additional paragraph would be needed to explain and clean up the you/du mess.
I have been trying for years to find out why the authors of modern (current) textbooks now use you instead of thou. I'd be most grateful if someone who knows the rationale behind it would post the reason.
Incidentally, my father's textbook was published sometime around 1930, so this you substitution is a relatively recent phenomena.
> it is reserved for the closest of relationships such as family, lovers etc.
You use du for your friends, your classmates, people your own age up through about college, and anyone you think you are or should be on informal terms with. Such as shop workers (sometimes), bartenders (usually), waiters (depending on location), random people in the street (in places like Berlin, if they're not senior citizens), and anyone -- regardless of age or station -- who has said du to you first, unless you want to very specifically snub them. You use du with people you play Fußball against even if you've never met them before and they're ten years older than you. Same with drinking. It would, perhaps counterintuitively, be rude to use Sie in many social situations involving complete strangers. Unless they're old.
Then there is the ritual, rarely followed anymore, of actually formally suggesting that you and someone else -- usually a work colleague -- use du with each other... and refusing that request is giving a very cold shoulder, there normally would not be another offer in one lifetime. (An "inferior" should not suggest it to his/her "superior," that would also be inappropriate.)
Du does enough work in German as she is spoke, I don't think it makes sense for foreigners to learn the Sie form before having proper facility with all the du grammar. Given the immigration trends of the last 20 years, people will just be happy to hear German in the first place. Then learn to properly siezen when you're already conversational. My zwo Pfennig anyway.
I'll second just about all of this, the one bit of colour I can add - years ago I had a summer job in a German-speaking (auto) shop where a majority of the workers, including some of the management were immigrants with a fairly wide range of German proficiency but everyone had picked up the onsite du/Sie conventions (along with some others like shaking hands at the beginning of the shift). It's, like you're saying, as much a cultural convention with contextual intricacies as it is a grammatical feature of the language.
Funnily enough, my example was also from Vienna in the 90's, a specific place and time somewhat more, err, uptight about these things than I'd say today's conversational German on average.
First, note my correction to the mistake in the above 'Afterthought'. Brain wasn't in gear.
_
Thanks for the info. My German is far from perfect so I don't claim any authority on the matter.
Most of my time in a German-speaking environment was in Austria (Wien) and that was now some years ago. Back when I was learning the language it was always stressed to me not to use du even with friends as it would be deemed as unwanted or excessive familiarity and could be taken as an offense.
That said, from my limited experience there's are significant cultural differences between, say, Berlin and Wien with the latter being more formal and reserved (or it was so when I was living there two decades ago). Thus I find your observation interesting, so I'm now quite curious to see what cultural shifts if any have taken place in Wien since then.
My first time there was in the early 1980s whilst Communism was still in place, so back then there was essentially no movement of people between Czechoslovakia, Hungary, etc. and Austria. When I went back in the early 1990 and lived there at various times for about a decade I noticed a definite cultural shift which the locals put down to the movement of people from ex-communist counties such as Slovenia. However I can't say I noticed any shift in the language, but then that's not surprising as most people I worked or dealt with were better at English than I was in German.
No doubt things have become more informal almost everywhere these days so I'm not surprised that there has been a shift in German usage just as there has been in English—even in my lifetime it's been very noticeable.
English is a dog of language, it's slipshod, inconsistent and all over the place (it beats me how anyone who is not a native speaker ever learns it). The point I was making about thou/du illustrates the problem with English quite well, English-speakers are notoriously bad at learning second languages so why make, say, learning German even more complex by not explaining actual parallels between the two languages? It seems no one cares much about the details these days.
As an aside, in English you goes for everything—friends, relatives, one's dog, even inanimate objects. Thus it's interesting to note slang has picked up the cudgels and fought back with a colloquial use of the second person with youse. Many wince at this word and consider it uncouth and uneducated, but when one thinks about it, it makes sense when talking to a small group of friends. Seems funny really, we English speakers chucked out the perfectly good second-person (and respectable) word thou and at least in some circles have replaced it with the uncouth youse. Clearly, modern English is missing something important by using you for the singular and plural forms of the second person.
For the second person plural, variations like "youns", "yous" and "yis" are used frequently in the informal speech of rural Northern Ireland. Though you risk being jeered and taken less seriously if these were spoken in a formal or business setting - it would give you a distinct rural twang.
You may or may not consider these better than "youse", though I will say "yous" before "y'all" (quaint American import) regardless of context to the day I die.
Youse or whatever, the word doesn't matter in the broader context (and youse is regional anyway). Your comment just illustrates my point that people often want to make a distinction when using the second person you.
> English-speakers are notoriously bad at learning second languages
My experience of learning German is that Germans would prefer to speak with you in English, as they want to practise their language skills with a native speaker.
English speakers aren't bad at learning new languages, rather there is little incentive to do so, given everyone speaks or wants to speak English.
Trying to speak a foreign language is sometimes met with confusion "why are you bothering to learn another language? Everyone speaks English" or downright hostility "if you're English just speak English".
"My experience of learning German is that Germans would prefer to speak with you in English,..."
That's often true, and usually they're much more competent in English than the English-speaker is in the foreign language.
From my observations many European countries pay much more attention to teaching foreign languages at a young age when it's easier to learn them than does the anglophone world. Seems to me if one speaks English then there's much less imperative to do so.
I know I'm the 'victim' of this attitude, I should have been trained in at least one foreign language from kindergarten onwards but wasn't. Back then I'd have likely whinged about it but I'd have been damn grateful decades later.
I think there's a certain level of cultural arrogance amongst English-speakers in that they don't have to put in the effort of learning a language when English is essentially a lingua franca. Reverse the situation you posed above about Germans preferring to speak in English. How many people in anglophone countries would prefer to speak to a visitor in say German? I think the answer proves my point.
Interesting. I learned German in Switzerland and the only people who ever use sie are all over 50. Everyone you meet is addressed as du, except maybe in formal letters.
I’m wondering if some weird looks I sometimes get in Germany might be because of that. Is “sie” used more commonly there?
I remember when I was learning German seriously I switched over software and websites to German... and felt very uncomfortable that facebook would always use 'du' with me. I'm guessing it's some marketing "oh we're so informal and cool" marketing wank talk, but it grossed me out.
Not sure if any native German speakers that had that reaction.
E-Mails from big cooperations become increasingly "du". Sometimes it's still weird, but overall everyone got used to being on "du" basis with big faceless cooperations. I don't really notice anymore.
That being said, I'm young enough to have not really experienced a time when it was unheard of to call someone you don't know really well "du". I'm only learning from this thread that it seems to be a fairly recent development.
Certainly, even in British English I remember when my bank moved from formal text messages to 'friendly' on the basis of a survey I never remember receiving.
It is weird getting a balance update with "Hi" as the leader and emoticons throughout. We're not chums, just give me the news in the most emotionless manner possible.
And don't get me started on the direction Microsoft went with Windows 10/11. "We're just getting things ready!" "Working on it..." "Something went wrong :(".... Eugh!
In contrast, in Spanish, they generally say "tu" rather than "usted", eg in restaurants, shops, etc. "Usted" is reserved for the more polite interactions, older people, etc.
"English no distinction is made between the second and third person 'you'."
Duh! I ought to read what I write before posing. Obviously what I said is garbage, what I meant was '...in modern English no distinction is made between the second person singular and plural forms in that both use the pronoun'you.'
I'm from a country where there is a different version and I hate it because it makes me overthink every time about which one is appropriate to use now with people I don't know.
Maybe I should completely ditch it, and use the informal one with everyone new, just with the hopes of building immediate rapport. I must not be the only one to hate it, and surely those people who would mind me using the informal one are not worth my time in the first place.
Luckily we don't have gendered pronouns though, so we can avoid that problem altogether.
I think in the end best and most scalable language is the one that avoids having any implications in the "you" or "pronouns". We are all humans after all.
If negotiating the tu/vous distinction takes major mental effort, are you on the spectrum? Difficulty with understanding social cues and (these distinctions are also about creating distance) other people’s space is a typical trait of autism. These linguistic innovations wouldn't spread – and often quickly, within a couple of generations – if the neurotypical masses found them burdensome.
I'm in a country with this distinction, too, and I don't like strangers addressing me with the informal just like that. Every sociolinguistic setting is different, but using just the informal might not automatically create rapport but the opposite. Saying people like myself aren't worth your time sounds like sour grapes, and it might rob you of some opportunities.
I had a psychologist diagnose me, and I was almost on the spectrum according to the test (with points), but not quite to give me the diagnosis. Obviously the questionnaires are ambiguous with their questions enough to have so many different ways of interpreting the questions that to me makes many of those questions non-sensical in the first place. But actually, I have been to mental institutions multiple times, and in many cases the evaluators have mentioned "autistic tendencies". In the end - am I on the spectrum? I don't know, but I still would feel like I would benefit from it if I would just try to make a joke and then become warm and call them with the informal and singular "you" in my language. I hope it could show that we are all in this together.
In the Netherlands, it is very regional whether or not you use the polite form. In the capital region, it is not used, and use is a signifier you are from the countryside, if your accent wasn't enough. There are courses on how to get rid of your accent (or rather, get one of the capital region), and ceasing the employ of the polite form is featured.
I’m surprised to read this, inasmuch as when I briefly lived in Rotterdam (if “capital region” comprises it, too) some years ago, my local acquaintances coached me in where to use the formal, and where to use the informal, and the distinction seemed very much alive.
Thats funny because in Austria it’s the other way around. People in Vienna are used to being overpolite and will use the formal “Sie” abundantly, whereas on the countryside everyone is always almost “Du”. There is the saying: “Am Land sind alle per Du”.
It isn't difficult to see why. Vienna was an imperial capital, the Netherlands 'capital region' was ruled by (wealthy) capitalists. One group would be focused on courtesy, the other on efficiency, wouldn't they?
Naturally, both are ultimately evolved into appearance, not substance (because of courae this difference isnt substantial).
> If negotiating the tu/vous distinction takes major mental effort, are you on the spectrum
For me it’s the fact that these days it’s very inconsistent. The “rules” were pretty clear 20-30+ years ago. Now it’s a bit of a mess and there is a lot of overlap.
> Saying people like myself aren't worth your time sounds like sour grapes
I mean.. you’re somebody who just claimed that a random person is autistic because he doesn’t conform with some social norm you find to be somehow extremely important (specifically) in your environment. So it might not be such a bad heuristic.
I didn’t claim that the person was autistic, I asked. And I asked because the way he described his difficulty is precisely what can finds in the literature on autism and sociolinguistics. And as you can see, I wasn’t far off the mark. I also specifically said that the rules of my environment might not apply to his.
indeed inconsistency is the problem. using the informal among colleagues at work, and especially with superiors is often the sign of a more relaxed work atmosphere, which is something people want and is thus becoming more common. especially in international companies where multiple languages are used.
there is never a question what to use when i am talking to cashiers, clerks, etc. but when i am at a tech meetup or an informal gathering of people from different companies then the way to address people is very much in question. you never know how people like to be addressed. and while using the formal option may seem like the safe choice, it really isn't because it forces others to be formal with me too, and when i am the only one doing that it puts me into an odd position. the only safe option is to avoid any choice until the other makes their choice.
> it makes me overthink every time about which one is appropriate to use now with people I don't know
The issue still comes up, but in different ways. To a friend I might say "Where's the nearest cashpoint?", but to a stranger I'd say "Excuse me, but would you happen to know where I could find the nearest cashpoint, please".
German also has the 2 levels, but addressing the police with the informal you might get you into trouble. There's a great clip (not sure if it's a sketch show or a 360p mobile phone recording) of a guy peeking out of his apartment door and seeing a lot of coos, and he says to one of them, "Piss off, you (informal) asshole!." . The cop says "excuse me?", and the guy responds with, "Ah, sorry, you (formal) asshole!". The next bit is the cop kicking down the door... maybe it was one of those Cops-style reality shows.
That's funny. But yeah, if someone has an authority over me like that, I wouldn't ever dare. It's mostly a question I guess when speaking to people I'm doing business/service with.
English is my mother tongue but I live in a German (sort-of, it's complicated) speaking country. I've learned that "scheisse" is not a very good translation for the English word "sh*t". It seems to me that the English word is much stronger/more offensive than the common German translation at least where I'm from.
German "scheisse" seems more at the level of "damn" in my experience (maybe it varies according to region?) and so is acceptable to be used in many more situations than the common English translation - i.e. by young kids or with strangers.
I think German speakers, as a result, don't realize how strong the English word is and use it a bit more liberally than would be expected. For example, I was very surprised that broadsheet (respectable) newspapers will casually drop an expression like "sh*tstorm" into a German sentence in a serious article.
Words change roles, and shit is a very good contemporary example. Among my children's generation (mid-20s to mid-30s) it is now just as much as stand-in for "stuff" as it is an expression of anger or insult. "Where am I going to put all this shit?" does still carry a hint of a negative tone (directed towards the stuff), but barely any.
he's wrong that "shit" is the most complicated word in english. That would be "jawn" - an adjective, noun, verb and more all in one little 4-letter package, which is also true of "shit", except that nobody not raised in Philadelphia knows the true scope of "jawn".
well i look forward to when ismo gets to philadelpia and learns about "yawn". i expect he'll start out saying something like "i thought when i learned about the word shit, it was the most complicated word in english, but i turns out i still didn't know shit ..."
> It seems to me that the English word is much stronger/more offensive than the common German translation at least where I'm from.
This must vary hugely from place to place.
I’ve know people here (builders and Australians) to use ‘c*t’ as a sort of endearment, and there aren’t a ton of scenarios where ‘shit’ would cause anyone problems.
I got my phd in Communication and when I taught interpersonal communication, one of the articles we would have students read had an example of an American who was in Austria for a year or two. He was at a party talking to an Austrian friend when the Austrian's girlfriend came over. She stared using the informal "you." Later he asked her why she had decided to use the informal and she said, "I don't know. I just did it. You were talking with my boyfriend so I assumed I was on the same level as him." https://www.google.com/books/edition/Language_Shock/xOE4nPuW...
Wouldn't you always need to think a little on how to engage with formal vs informal even if the language didn't have it built in ? I wouldn't address a child the same as a stranger or a boss even in English
440 comments
[ 52.4 ms ] story [ 5197 ms ] threadOld Yorkshire phrase for telling children to mind who they address as 'thee / tha': "Don't thee tha them as thas thee" - kind of a similar sense as 'mind your Ps and Qs'.
> English dialects are hyper localized
On a vaguely related note, has anyone else (particularly in Yorkshire) use "seef"/"seefing" to mean "see if"/"seeing if" (as in "I was seefing/seeing if it was in the car")? I hear it all the time from my immediate family, but I've never been able to find it referenced beyond that.
'What about ye?' - would be a friendly way of asking 'how do you do?'
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 this point. English language works older than Shakespeare such as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Beowulf are pretty much always read in translation.
E.g Icelandic and Faroese aren't really mutually intelligible with Norwegian today, despite both being evolved directly from Old Norwegian, because both places were originally settled by Norwegian vikings.
Shakepeare is essentially just very old school, yet still Modern English. This still feels within the realm of understanding of current day native speakers equipped with a good dictionary.
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 is some thing else again. That definitely seems to me like a foreign language.
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.
Seems like the answers suggest I’m just imagining something that didn’t happen, but it was a fun thought.
Eth has voice on and thorn voice off.
Ð/ð (eth) certainly is the voiced th in Old English and modern Icelandic. I’m not sure why thorn was being used for ‘the’.
It’s a very old reference and may not be online, but what my germanic linguistics professor used with us Germanic linguistics grad students. He was a world renowned expert on the various futhark versions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmer_H._Antonsen
https://a.co/d/0u4S28Y
Note modern English collapsed the distinction into simpler orthography, “th” for both eth and thorn, so simplicity in spelling certainly happens.
þ?
I can see it is LATIN SMALL LETTER Y + COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER S .. not sure what that ligature is, though. My knowledge of old English is very lacking :)
edit: it shows up in the "descendants" list on the side of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
From Middle English you, yow, ȝow (object case of ye), from Old English ēow (“you”, dative case of ġē), from Proto-Germanic iwwiz (“you”, dative case of jīz), Western form of izwiz (“you”, dative case of jūz), from Proto-Indo-European yūs (“you”, plural), yū́.
Gutenbergs printing press was the mid 15th century, well into the Middle English era.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_(pronoun)
Thus, to be polite, you address someone as many people that aren't part of the conversation.
This has been interesting as an English speaker learning Dutch! Luckily I never really latched on to sms-speak but I can imagine some cohorts of English speakers have to break the habit of reading “u” as shorthand for the the full word.
Apparently Dutch originally had "du" as 2nd person singular and "gij" as 2nd person plural. From the 16th century, "gij" started being used as singular polite form. (Possibly under the influence of Latin and French.) Later, "du" disappeared. Up to this point, the progression is similar to English.
"gij" then transformed to "jij" in the northern part of the Dutch language area and in written language; while it remained "gij" in Flemish spoken language.
However, then in the 17th century people started using "Uwe Edelheit" ("Your Nobility") as a new formal form in letters. This evolved into the current formal pronoun "u".
(Note also that the accusative form of "gij" is also "u", but is not related to the formal "u".)
Sources: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gij, https://etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/gij, https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_(voornaamwoord), https://etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/u
As for sms-speak, I'd be flabbergasted if you encountered the u-form anywhere in text messages except maybe in automated OTP messages from your bank. So I would guess that's something you needn't worry about :).
Good luck in your language-learning journey. Assuming you're living in the Netherlands, I'm curious as to how your integration is going? My observation is that Dutch culture can be insanely hard for foreigners to get a foothold in, partly because of the "polite" tendency of most locals to insist on speaking English around non-native Dutch. I feel like that gesture, which may seem accommodating on the surface level, can almost be an exclusionary dynamic in itself.
Appreciate the spelling tip. I make a lot of mistakes writing in Dutch as it is. I would likely keep doing that by instinct until someone told me.
I am in the Netherlands for just over a year now. I live in a small village near the Belgian border and work in Eindhoven. I've actually found my neighbors and coworkers very accommodating towards my efforts to learn your language. I've taken 90 hours of lessons in about 9 months, which made me more confident to push people more and challenge myself. At my job, I try not to speak English for social situations, although all of our work is done in English due to remote workers in other countries.
Although I've had a good experience, I can see how some less assertive immigrants might not feel empowered to ask others honor their social requests. There have been times that I asked for something in Dutch, and without any hesitation, the attendant or store worker responded to my request in English. That stings a bit, but it stings for my ego because it doesn't usually happen. Many Dutch people in my daily life ask me to repeat myself, but they don't automatically make an assumption about my preferences and instead rely on the clues of the conversation to guide their responses. All of this is also dependent on the situation, eg. for work tasks, I speak English, because miscommunication is not an option.
If someone is reading this also as a new NL immigrant, I would say you should be assertive and ask a little on your path to find friends. It's okay to make friends in one language and transition to another if you both speak it. Shopping should be done in Dutch, read the Dutch newspaper, etc etc. Put in the effort and many Dutchmen will respect that. Habit might let their tongue slip, but kindly and firmly remind them, and they'll go back.
For Dutchies, I would say that that it's probably worth the effort to make a friend. If not, consider it the new normal for politeness. Just try to keep going in the same language until visible confusion or a blocking of progress in the conversation.
If you don't mind, I'd love if you reached out and sent me an email! I'd love to keep chatting about it. Address is in my profile.
Incidentally, in Norwegian the formal form is now so archaic that short of communicating very formally with a very old person, in most cases it will come across as rude and sarcastic (you're implying someone is seriously up themselves)
There is a wide literature on Latin forms of address. Eleanor Dickey's monograph published by Oxford University Press is a good survey.
https://www.elisamotterle.com/galateo-del-tu-del-lei-e-del-v...
https://www.treccani.it/magazine/atlante/cultura/Diamoci_del...
Beware the treccani is the most used/influential encyclopaedia in italy, so I’d tend to say that i trust them a lot
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treccani
> In antichità, quando si parlava latino, le formule di cortesia non esistevano … L’usanza del Voi nasce insieme a una nuova formula politica: la tetrarchia introdotta nel 293 da Diocleziano.
It was an innovation in Romance that took place centuries after Caesar and most of the Imperial era. Again, there is ample scholarly literature on this, so no need to resort to popular references like encyclopedias.
Or the plague and the subsequent Arab invasions. The empire was rebounded several times from near collapse after the 300s
(note that english aristocrats were often spoken of, not by given [or if they had one, family] name, but by the geographical entity that was the basis of their nobility)
Interesting to see the use of “Er” as a put down.
[1] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Höflichkeitsform
Not only is "you" the formal, polite plural form, but calling someone "thou" was also seen as so informal as to be rude (in verb form, to "thou" someone). This has a modern equivalent in the term "tutoyer" in French.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/thou
An interesting counterpoint is the usage in Japanese of sarcastically polite forms like お前 and 貴様, where you use a pronoun with a surface meaning of extreme respect, as a form of insult.
(Useless trivia bit… Apparently Emperor Charles V invented the styling of “His Majesty”. Before him, kings and emperors were addressed as highnesses, but he wanted something fancier after being crowned as the Holy Roman Emperor in addition to the kingships he already held.)
It's more of a social distance, with V-form for people outside the personal sphere, and T-form for people outside the public sphere.
So, as an atheist, I'd use V-form* with the Christian God, but His Believers really ought to be using T-form with Him.
* Si vous plaît, j'aimerais bien savior comment fonctionne la turbulence ... mais ne vous inquiétez pas si l'explication serait trop compliqué !
see also https://www.newscientist.com/letter/mg12416936-800-letter-la...
(but the way I heard the joke is that the scientist has planned to ask Him how to resolve gravitation with quantum mechanics, and only then the bystanders inquire, why not ask about turbulence?)
So I guess "the royal 'We'" falls under "believing your own marketing".
We somehow make do - it helps that Korean allows just omitting pronoun when the context is clear (same as Japanese).
I think the reason for the rotation of pronouns is because people start using them sarcastically which means it's no longer seen as respectful, and so new pronouns become necessary.
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 implicitly refer to multiple people (sort of like the royal We), which obviously wouldn't be acceptable in Christianity.
This should be common knowledge for native English speakers. It's hard to read Shakespeare without knowing this. But for non-native speaker, this would be mysterious.
Why would that need to be common knowledge 3-400 years later then?
It just seemed so silly to think that God only understands archaic English.
Now it turns out these people I despised were only being respectful, and trying to use the formal forms?
However, since it seems that "thee" and "thou" were actually the informal forms of "you" in 17th century English, now I'm really confused why they suddenly started talking this way the moment they crossed the threshold of the church.
Unnecessary reverence of the King James Bible translation, probably.
As noted in Wikipedia:
> As William Tyndale translated the Bible into English in the early 16th century, he preserved the singular and plural distinctions that he found in his Hebrew and Greek originals. He used thou for the singular and ye for the plural regardless of the relative status of the speaker and the addressee. Tyndale's usage was standard for the period and mirrored that found in the earlier Wycliffe's Bible and the later King James Bible.
Later, presumably due to French influence, "thou" became informal and "you" formal.
Finally "thou" was dropped from everyday speech, though it still shows up in various old phrases.
Another pattern is that religious language tends to be archaic. For example, Jews pray in ancient Hebrew, Muslims in classical Arabic, some Catholics in classical Latin, and so on. I don't know whether this is done to create a sense of awe and mystery, or because religions try to appear unchanging.
As non-native speaker I had learned early that 'you' so I thought that there was probably some other form no longer used.
even in places and situations where 'tu' is used it's mostly still conjugated as if it were second person singular.
'EU BEM QUE TE AVISEI - TU EMPINOU ELE PEI'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Germanic_languages#Validi...
"Y'all" = plural you
"All y'all" = "all of [plural] you" as distinct from "some of you/y'all"
Don't think I've ever heard a singular y'all. "How ya doin'" would be the singular version of "How y'all doin"
"y'all" - explicitly addressing >1 person
"y'all" - explicitly addressing 1 person while implicitly addressing >1 people. I might say "how y'all doin" to a friend, implying "how are you and your family doing"
"all y'all" - >>1 person or addressing >1 person that was not included in the previous "y'all"
"y'all" - explicitly and implicitly addressing 1 person whom I have not made acquaintance with. If I were working as a server in a restaurant and had a single person come in, I may address them with "y'all". "What can I get y'all?" is the same as "what can I get you?" but the "y'all" gives it some extra politeness or an "emphatic southern accent"
"You" implicitly means "thou and thine underlings" when used in singular. Which makes in polite.
"y'all" will probably share the same fate in English.
While we Texans might find it polite or friendly, in the corporate world I’ve been told to avoid using it in emails.
The singular polite "y'all" I'm referring to is generally used when the other party is not known. F.ex. I regularly, though certainly not always, hear clerks, waiters, or other service industry workers using "y'all" singularly when asking "what can I get y'all to eat" or "y'all need anything else" when speaking to exactly one person, and I use it that way myself.
I think this is the formal singular "y'all" that people keep referring to. It can sometimes be short for "you and your family," which is why you would see it in greetings and goodbyes e.g. "How are y'all doing today" or "I hope to see y'all again soon."
For signs of formality, it has the indirection of not addressing the person directly (like "your grace" "your honor" or "your mercy"), and is usually used as an stylized expression of concern. To my ear, "How was y'all's holidays?" sounds really professional, like how your lawyer would start a meeting.
* ti (second person singular)
* vi (second person plural)
* oni (third person plural) -- archaic
* tu (second person singular, informal)
* dumneata (second person singular, semi-formal)
* dumneavoastră (second person plural, formal)
"dumne" comes "domn" aka "sir".
Pronouns tend to be some of the most fixed words in a language, up there with numbers and basic words like for "water" or "mother". They undergo sound change, and shifts like how English lost thou, but they are almost never replaced wholesale.
All those languages are in fact descended from a common language spoken several thousand years ago. About half of the world today speaks a language in the Indo-European language family.
If you don't know (as I didn't for a long time) that she has switched to intimate/informal language then the scene has less impact. Especially since Aragorn keeps things formal in his reply.
http://coco.raceme.org/literature/lordoftherings/returnking/...
He uses "thee" and "thou" to simulate the informal Spanish "tú".
> Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.
Tolkien also talks in Appendix F of The Return of the King about how hobbits had largely lost the distinction between "you" and "thou" - so when Pippin speaks to Denethor in Minas Tirith and addresses him with the familial term, people assume that he must be royalty himself to address the Steward in such an informal manner.
Technically I guess he was about as close to royalty as you can get in the Shire.
__
I've mentioned on HN previously when discussing languages that when my father was learning German his old textbook had the English thee, thou, and thine/thy as the second person for the German second person du.
One of the faux pas for English speakers when learning German is the incorrect usage of du. They mistakenly use du instead of sie because it's more informal than sie not realizing that in German it is reserved for the closest of relationships such as family, lovers etc.
Essentially, in German du — the equivalent form of the second person English thou — is still a part of the living language whereas in English thou is now archaic.
The correct usage of du became immediately obvious to me after seeing my father's textbook. For the life of me I cannot understand why modern English textbooks simply substitute you for du, it's just crazy as it leads to much confusion.
Thou and variants are understood by most native English speakers even if the term is now archaic so it makes sense to use it instead of you in textbooks for learning German. Just one additional paragraph would be needed to explain and clean up the you/du mess.
I have been trying for years to find out why the authors of modern (current) textbooks now use you instead of thou. I'd be most grateful if someone who knows the rationale behind it would post the reason.
Incidentally, my father's textbook was published sometime around 1930, so this you substitution is a relatively recent phenomena.
1. has enough manners to not call people you don't know "du" (and you are not letting emotionality override those manners)
2. yet you know that person well enough to judge their behaviour and call them out as an asshole
It is a bit like punching someone with velvet gloves.
You use du for your friends, your classmates, people your own age up through about college, and anyone you think you are or should be on informal terms with. Such as shop workers (sometimes), bartenders (usually), waiters (depending on location), random people in the street (in places like Berlin, if they're not senior citizens), and anyone -- regardless of age or station -- who has said du to you first, unless you want to very specifically snub them. You use du with people you play Fußball against even if you've never met them before and they're ten years older than you. Same with drinking. It would, perhaps counterintuitively, be rude to use Sie in many social situations involving complete strangers. Unless they're old.
Then there is the ritual, rarely followed anymore, of actually formally suggesting that you and someone else -- usually a work colleague -- use du with each other... and refusing that request is giving a very cold shoulder, there normally would not be another offer in one lifetime. (An "inferior" should not suggest it to his/her "superior," that would also be inappropriate.)
Du does enough work in German as she is spoke, I don't think it makes sense for foreigners to learn the Sie form before having proper facility with all the du grammar. Given the immigration trends of the last 20 years, people will just be happy to hear German in the first place. Then learn to properly siezen when you're already conversational. My zwo Pfennig anyway.
_
Thanks for the info. My German is far from perfect so I don't claim any authority on the matter.
Most of my time in a German-speaking environment was in Austria (Wien) and that was now some years ago. Back when I was learning the language it was always stressed to me not to use du even with friends as it would be deemed as unwanted or excessive familiarity and could be taken as an offense.
That said, from my limited experience there's are significant cultural differences between, say, Berlin and Wien with the latter being more formal and reserved (or it was so when I was living there two decades ago). Thus I find your observation interesting, so I'm now quite curious to see what cultural shifts if any have taken place in Wien since then.
My first time there was in the early 1980s whilst Communism was still in place, so back then there was essentially no movement of people between Czechoslovakia, Hungary, etc. and Austria. When I went back in the early 1990 and lived there at various times for about a decade I noticed a definite cultural shift which the locals put down to the movement of people from ex-communist counties such as Slovenia. However I can't say I noticed any shift in the language, but then that's not surprising as most people I worked or dealt with were better at English than I was in German.
No doubt things have become more informal almost everywhere these days so I'm not surprised that there has been a shift in German usage just as there has been in English—even in my lifetime it's been very noticeable.
English is a dog of language, it's slipshod, inconsistent and all over the place (it beats me how anyone who is not a native speaker ever learns it). The point I was making about thou/du illustrates the problem with English quite well, English-speakers are notoriously bad at learning second languages so why make, say, learning German even more complex by not explaining actual parallels between the two languages? It seems no one cares much about the details these days.
As an aside, in English you goes for everything—friends, relatives, one's dog, even inanimate objects. Thus it's interesting to note slang has picked up the cudgels and fought back with a colloquial use of the second person with youse. Many wince at this word and consider it uncouth and uneducated, but when one thinks about it, it makes sense when talking to a small group of friends. Seems funny really, we English speakers chucked out the perfectly good second-person (and respectable) word thou and at least in some circles have replaced it with the uncouth youse. Clearly, modern English is missing something important by using you for the singular and plural forms of the second person.
You may or may not consider these better than "youse", though I will say "yous" before "y'all" (quaint American import) regardless of context to the day I die.
My experience of learning German is that Germans would prefer to speak with you in English, as they want to practise their language skills with a native speaker.
English speakers aren't bad at learning new languages, rather there is little incentive to do so, given everyone speaks or wants to speak English.
Trying to speak a foreign language is sometimes met with confusion "why are you bothering to learn another language? Everyone speaks English" or downright hostility "if you're English just speak English".
That's often true, and usually they're much more competent in English than the English-speaker is in the foreign language.
From my observations many European countries pay much more attention to teaching foreign languages at a young age when it's easier to learn them than does the anglophone world. Seems to me if one speaks English then there's much less imperative to do so.
I know I'm the 'victim' of this attitude, I should have been trained in at least one foreign language from kindergarten onwards but wasn't. Back then I'd have likely whinged about it but I'd have been damn grateful decades later.
I think there's a certain level of cultural arrogance amongst English-speakers in that they don't have to put in the effort of learning a language when English is essentially a lingua franca. Reverse the situation you posed above about Germans preferring to speak in English. How many people in anglophone countries would prefer to speak to a visitor in say German? I think the answer proves my point.
I’m wondering if some weird looks I sometimes get in Germany might be because of that. Is “sie” used more commonly there?
Not sure if any native German speakers that had that reaction.
That being said, I'm young enough to have not really experienced a time when it was unheard of to call someone you don't know really well "du". I'm only learning from this thread that it seems to be a fairly recent development.
It is weird getting a balance update with "Hi" as the leader and emoticons throughout. We're not chums, just give me the news in the most emotionless manner possible.
And don't get me started on the direction Microsoft went with Windows 10/11. "We're just getting things ready!" "Working on it..." "Something went wrong :(".... Eugh!
Duh! I ought to read what I write before posing. Obviously what I said is garbage, what I meant was '...in modern English no distinction is made between the second person singular and plural forms in that both use the pronoun'you.'
Maybe I should completely ditch it, and use the informal one with everyone new, just with the hopes of building immediate rapport. I must not be the only one to hate it, and surely those people who would mind me using the informal one are not worth my time in the first place.
Luckily we don't have gendered pronouns though, so we can avoid that problem altogether.
I think in the end best and most scalable language is the one that avoids having any implications in the "you" or "pronouns". We are all humans after all.
I'm in a country with this distinction, too, and I don't like strangers addressing me with the informal just like that. Every sociolinguistic setting is different, but using just the informal might not automatically create rapport but the opposite. Saying people like myself aren't worth your time sounds like sour grapes, and it might rob you of some opportunities.
Joking aside: theres the school version of pioitesse, and the actual version.
Naturally, both are ultimately evolved into appearance, not substance (because of courae this difference isnt substantial).
For me it’s the fact that these days it’s very inconsistent. The “rules” were pretty clear 20-30+ years ago. Now it’s a bit of a mess and there is a lot of overlap.
> Saying people like myself aren't worth your time sounds like sour grapes
I mean.. you’re somebody who just claimed that a random person is autistic because he doesn’t conform with some social norm you find to be somehow extremely important (specifically) in your environment. So it might not be such a bad heuristic.
there is never a question what to use when i am talking to cashiers, clerks, etc. but when i am at a tech meetup or an informal gathering of people from different companies then the way to address people is very much in question. you never know how people like to be addressed. and while using the formal option may seem like the safe choice, it really isn't because it forces others to be formal with me too, and when i am the only one doing that it puts me into an odd position. the only safe option is to avoid any choice until the other makes their choice.
The issue still comes up, but in different ways. To a friend I might say "Where's the nearest cashpoint?", but to a stranger I'd say "Excuse me, but would you happen to know where I could find the nearest cashpoint, please".
The translation of "bad language" is very tricky.
English is my mother tongue but I live in a German (sort-of, it's complicated) speaking country. I've learned that "scheisse" is not a very good translation for the English word "sh*t". It seems to me that the English word is much stronger/more offensive than the common German translation at least where I'm from.
German "scheisse" seems more at the level of "damn" in my experience (maybe it varies according to region?) and so is acceptable to be used in many more situations than the common English translation - i.e. by young kids or with strangers.
I think German speakers, as a result, don't realize how strong the English word is and use it a bit more liberally than would be expected. For example, I was very surprised that broadsheet (respectable) newspapers will casually drop an expression like "sh*tstorm" into a German sentence in a serious article.
https://youtu.be/S1ZnpYEsUNs?si=nGr-2MgtBMR16dgl
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igh9iO5BxBo
This must vary hugely from place to place.
I’ve know people here (builders and Australians) to use ‘c*t’ as a sort of endearment, and there aren’t a ton of scenarios where ‘shit’ would cause anyone problems.
(Or maybe I’m being whooshed)
Did English ever have a formal version of “you”? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7215834 - Feb 2014 (193 comments)