As someone coming from a culture with T-V distinction [1], I always wished we dropped one of the branches like English did in the past.
The informal T vs formal V causes confusion in conversation with semi-strangers. Eg. At work you never really know which way to speak to someone at a watercooler. If you choose the informal T you make them your equal. Ehich might be perceived as insulting to them, since they might want to keep a perception of superiority to you for eg. being older, more tenured, etc. Often you'd rather choose not to even engage in a conversation and just keep your thoughts to yourself. Better than ending up in a inferior position when choosing the safe V, or risking insulting someone when using the informal T form.
This felt to me like one of the reasons why English became the dominant language for business over time. Together with simplified morphology (you only need to learn the plural by adding 's' at the end, vs. 5+ other tenses of each word) it just ended up being much easier to pick up and less risky to engage in conversations and therefore higher chances of adoption by non-speakers.
> This felt to me like one of the reasons why English became the dominant language for business over time.
I don't think that has much to do with it. I think it has more to do with the dominant political and economic position of the United States. French served a similar role in the past despite having all the features you describe.
I'd guess that the size of a country's import/export economy is more important than the size of its total economy when it comes to how much a country will influence language in the rest of the world.
Google is refusing to turn up anything useful when I try to find information on when the US became a top importer/exporter.
The US has always been one of the world's top exporters due to its cotton industry and the cotton boom that started in the 1780s. It is quite likely that the US was a Top 1 or 2 exporter by the time the Constitution was signed in 1789. Remember there were very few manufactured goods yet and not even that much else that was worth importing.
By the 1850s US cotton accounted for 77% of the cotton used in Britain, 90% used in France, 60% used in Germany, and 92% used in Russia.
Prior to the 1900s there was the British empire which spread English around a fair bit.
>At its height in the 19th and early 20th century, it was the largest empire in history and, for a century, was the foremost global power. (wikipedia)
It was said the sun never set on the British empire as it had bits in most time zones which led to a joke from the Indians that it was because God didn't trust the British in the dark.
Probably the combination of the British empire and subsequent US dominance led to english being established as the language. If you go to places like South Asia, English is pretty well established despite it being no one's native language there. So the British spread it around globally and then the US being a dominant superpower pretty much cemented it's status.
The dominance of America really started after WWII, but before that the British Empire spread the English language around the world.
If France had won the Seven Years War or the Napoleonic Wars, French would probably still be the global lingua franca, because people didn't choose which language to learn, they learned the language of whichever colonial power controlled their lands.
> America was an economic backwater until the 1900s.
That seems like a stretch.
My understanding is that plantation cash crops grown in the South like Cotton were a major export in the early-mid 19th Century.
And then of course Standard Oil was incorporated in 1870.
Maybe the effect of American industrialization didn't have a big effect internationally until the ~1890s and onward, but I'd hardly say the USA was a backwater throughout the industrial revolution.
> Maybe the effect of American industrialization didn't have a big effect internationally until the ~1890s and onward, but I'd hardly say the USA was a backwater throughout the industrial revolution.
The US had a huge effect on industrialized Europe before that. The British textile revolution would never have happened if the US hadn't supplied a large chunk of the cotton (from plantations in the South) and if the British hadn't physically destroyed the the-dominant textile industry in India.
The adjective order one is really interesting to explain: the adjectives in "good small old red wooden English book" have to come in that order or it sounds very peculiar.
Other European languages may have this to, but explaining it to people who speak unrelated languages usual results in a wail of "but why?!"
Many English speakers don't themselves realise it - in the UK, at least, we are not carefully taught English piece by piece after a very young age. Most grammatical understanding comes when (if!) you study a foreign language and then you find out that "find out" is a thing called a "phrasal verb".
> "good small old red wooden English book" have to come in that order or it sounds very peculiar.
Interesting. As a native English speaker (from the US), I'd say that "good small old" felt a little awkward for me to say out loud. Personally, I'd probably say "good old small ...", but to your point, there isn't exactly a "right" answer, just one that sounds right. I'm assuming you're also a native English speaker from the UK, so maybe we've discovered a funky difference between the English in our two countries. It would be a fun study to give native English speakers a list of those adjectives, and the noun "book", and tell them to order them.
As a native English speaker from England, I'd always keep "good" and "old" together, and probably put them at the beginning of the sentence. I'd also use "little" rather than "small" in such a context: "my good old little red wooden English book." To me that would sound just right.
Yeah, but "good old" has an independent phrasal meaning, as in "good old Charlie Brown". That's fine if that's what you mean, or if you want to play with the ambiguity between the two interpretations - but if that's definitely not what you mean, then best use the standard phrasing.
I don't think it's independent at all. I think it assigns the quality of good oldness to things that are good but not old. Or it refers to things that are good and familiar.
Yup. That's probably a better way to say exactly what I meant. "Good old" can mean something that's good but not old. "Old, good" means both old, and good. Thank you.
I suppose a comma might disambiguate, within a list of qualities, but I think my point stands.
Steven Pinker's book on irregular verbs has a great example of this.
little kids often mess up on irregular verbs ("I eated supper") because they (subconsciously?) learn the grammar, they aren't memorizing the past tense of every word
This is true of every language though. Language acquisition works like this (and people understand what young children mean) regardless of whether you're learning English or Spanish or German or Korean.
I think in German some smashed up sentence like "ich haben gegesst der Abendessen" would also be understandable no matter how brutally you fluff the verb's conjugation and gender of the noun.
> Other European languages may have this to, but explaining it to people who speak unrelated languages usual results in a wail of "but why?!"
They do, and just like in your other example, they internalize it, they just don't realize they do it automatically because it "sounds good".
> Most grammatical understanding comes when (if!) you study a foreign language and then you find out that "find out" is a thing called a "phrasal verb".
That's super funny, isn't this taught in middle school or something? In Romania you study Romanian grammar from 5th to 8th grade (11/12 to 14/15), and you learn syntax, morphology, etc.
Does the average English speaker really not know about the term "phrasal verb"? :-)
> Does the average English speaker really not know about the term "phrasal verb"? :-)
Yes.
Furthermore, I didn't know the English word for it, despite being a native speaker, but do know the German "Verben mit Präpositional-Ergänzung", from having learnt German.
Speakers of English as a foreign language will know more about English grammar than English native speakers.
Speaking only for my own experience growing up in the Western United States in the 80s and '90s, everyone was taught grammar from elementary school through senior year in high school, where the only required course was English. All of the pieces were taught. However, there is widespread ignorance among native English speakers about grammar. I don't think it's lack of education, but something else. My theory is that it just isn't interesting or particularly useful or helpful, so the information is quickly forgotten. With most things in education, they recur on an ongoing basis through life. English grammar on the other hand, does not, because you can get remarkably far by just going on how things sound.
I think the brain is designed to free up memory holding information that is not useful. Memory associated with a technical term like phrasal verb seems to be something it would garbage collect.
The brain will remember the term while it’s useful — to get a good grade on a test. After that, for most (almost all?) people it is useless to remember.
There are a ton of language quirks that have their own name, but aren't prominent enough that they're taught - especially not in your native language, if they're peculiar to it. (In a second language, they often have to be taught, because they stick out and make no sense in the context of your first language).
Phrasal verbs are not typically mentioned when Norwegian kids learn English, because not only do we have them, we typically use them in exactly the same way (e.g "eat up" is the same as "spis opp", "find out" is the same as "finne ut"). No reason to explain an obscure and odd concept if kids do the right thing by default anyway.
"Modal particles", small words that subtly indicate the speaker's certainty or degree of concern, likewise is another strange little grammatical quirk that German has, but Norwegian kids generally don't need a name for since Norwegian has them too and they can mostly just be translated directly.
There are lots of tricky things in English language, but the adjective order doesn't nearly carry the potential for embarrassment as gender-related mistakes.
A couple of examples that come to mind is using the wrong verb form, since English has a lot of irregular verbs, and another is mispronouncing words, since there are many words with the same spelling but different pronunciations. And then you have words like "read", which have both characteristics.
It's probably the most common class of error for people who learn English as adults. There's lots of strange, hard to explain meaning encoded in which (if any) article a person chooses. "I dropped by the school today" and "I dropped by school today" are both valid and have slightly different implications
But those are pronounced differently. Of course, English has its fair share; Their / They're / There, beach / beech, etc etc.
But I don't think English particularly stands out, and I can think of languages that are much worse than it in that regard (especially for an outsider). Mandarin / Cantonese / Japanese / French / Korean are all pretty notorious examples for homophone collisions.
There are not that many words distinguished only by gender and I don’t think the number of those where it would really be an embarrassing blunder is that great. All languages offer pitfalls like this anyway.
(French here) It’s not really about words distinguished by gender, but misgendering a word will sound very weird to French people. So much so you’ll be labeled as foreign immediately. As crazy as it may seem, but misgendering objects sounds worse than misgendering people (in a purely linguistic way).
I mean, of course, but sounding obviously foreign isn't so bad if your meaning can be understood and you haven't accidentally said something with a wildly different meaning than intended.
People really overestimate the importance of this. If you go to le or la gare doesn't matter much. But if you don't know "gare" in the first place you could have a harder time.
Also "embarrassing yourself" doesn't happen because everybody loves it when n-th (for any n > 1) language speakers attempt to speak their language.
> The noun gendering alone makes it significantly easier to embarrass yourself speaking French than English.
This... greatly underestimates the number of ways you can make a mistake while speaking a foreign language.
If you're a non-Francophone trying to speak French, you have a 100% of making obvious mistakes while you try, and some of those mistakes will probably relate to noun gendering.
If you're a non-Anglophone trying to speak English, you have the same - 100% - chance of making obvious mistakes while you try to do that. Depending on what languages you do speak, you may or may not make mistakes in noun gendering. (English noun gendering is a huge problem for Chinese speakers, and boy does it make them sound unnatural.)
But that doesn't matter; that's just one way to make a mistake. Your odds of making no mistakes of any kind are zero. Why worry about one particular subclass? You're foreign and everyone who hears you will recognize that.
Shipping sure, but also simply the fact that a good part of the worlds population were part of the British empire. Wikipedia has 23% of the world population at 1913.
Germany was not even unified by the time the UK took over India from the East India Company. Germany eventually had colonies, but they altogether didn't have such a long-lasting influence on the global economy as the British Empire had.
The French colonial empire was much larger, but in the 19th century they were not really present in the Americas anymore, and Vietnam was their only major colony in Asia.
Yes, but the German speaking empire of the last centuries was Austria, not Germany.
Both had limited reach outside Europe. Germany had that colonial push to grab what was left in Africa and in Oceania at the end of the 19th century. Losing WW1 ended it all.
The legacy of that empire (it was purely Austria only after 1809) and of Prussia was quite long-lasting though. Because of the medieval Ostsiedlung and rulers granting land and privileges, there once were German-speaking enclaves all over Eastern Europe. A few still exist. Only ethnic cleansing after WWII and Germany enabling them to move away by granting citizenship to them made them disappear.
Some legacy still remains: for economic reasons, German is one of the most frequently learned languages in Eastern Europe.
Is speaking to someone formally considered ending up in an inferior position in all cultures?
In Persian if someone expects to be spoken with formally, they have to speak formally themselves. So when you speak formally you're kinda bringing both parties up. You can even flirt by speaking formally.
In Spanish asymmetric conversations have always been a thing, e.g. student-teacher, patient-doctor or younger-older conversations where the former side uses V and the latter T.
The V is gradually being dropped in Spain and in the last few decades the process seems to have accelerated, though, definitely it seems faster than in French (although I don't know that much about French). I don't think my 4-year-old son will have much use for the V in his life. And like your parent comment, I also think that's probably for the best in our case, although it does sound like it's probably different in Persian.
> The V is gradually being dropped in Spain and in the last few decades the process seems to have accelerated
I own a Spanish textbook printed (in English) in 1958 that says about «usted»: ‘It is the universal respectful address of society, and the only one the foreigner is ever likely to employ or hear addressed to him, unless he marries a native or forms intimate friendships.’ How times have changed!
This is what I was taught as well when taking Spanish 30 years ago. Fast forward 20 years and me visiting Mexico City for the first time, and I got some really strange looks using usted
Spanish has lots of funky history in its second person pronouns that vary regionally. After Argentina's recent election I've been consuming lots of content from there, and it sometimes surprises me how frequently they use vos in things that would seem to call for politeness. Vos itself was formal address in Spain in the time of Cervantes IIRC, it is also the origin of vuestro merced (usted)
> After Argentina's recent election I've been consuming lots of content from there, and it sometimes surprises me how frequently they use vos in things that would seem to call for politeness. Vos itself was formal address in Spain in the time of Cervantes IIRC, it is also the origin of vuestro merced (usted)
vos is not really formal in Argentinian Spanish, although it does share an etymologocal root with vuestro merced/Usted.
Argentinian Spanish is itself pretty different from other Latin American dialects, but in general vos is used interchangeably with tú, to the point where the accusative form of "vos" is also te - ie, "Vos te levantás" instead of "tú te levantas" (note the location of the accents in each example).
The connotations of formality (or lack thereof) are subtle and vary much more widely than you might imagine - far more than the comment limit on HN would permit - but by and large it's better to think of vos as the informal pronoun, and the only question is whether it's used alongside tú, in place of it, or in some weird combination that has its own subtle connotations.
I know this. What I'm saying is I'm surprised at people using vos where usted seems kind of necessary to me. What I also said is that vos was formal 500 years ago, which is an unrelated observation.
And that depends on the country as well. In Colombia usted can be formal or not, as in parents using it with their children, or among friends, where supposedly tú or vos would be more appropriate.
And in many ways still is, especially for kids, but Southern English also has mechanisms for expressing familiarity and respect at the same time - it was in no way unusual for us to call friends' parents by their first name, provided we prefixed it with "Mr/Miss" (always Miss, for some reason, even if an obviously married woman).
It's considered "polite" to imply that the woman in question is obviously still an unmarried hottie, which is why you always "err on the side of Miss", rather than "mistake on the side of Mrs."
In Korean there are four commonly used forms, which map into the combination of (formal vs informal) x (polite vs not-so-polite). (That's a simple picture and the reality is a lot messier... but let's not get into that.)
E.g.,
Formal polite: military, business email, public announcement
Formal non-polite: textbooks, novels
Informal polite: kids' books, between coworkers, between customer and clerk
Informal non-polite: siblings, childhood friends, mom to kids
Is it because of cultural expectations in how men and women should address each other? Does the formal language get used for properly formal situations as well? Is there a whole set of specific terms for this?
Sorry for all the questions. I just found it fascinating.
Not sure about the specifics for Iran in particular (the grandparent can answer), I've just heard about that from some friends hailing from there.
But I could relate it, as it was a "chic" thing to do in my parts too back in the day (until around the 1970s), for upper class folks (using the polite forms of address, and so on).
A good analogy in English terms might be the flirting with all the speaking formalities in period movies live "Room with a view" or "Pride and Prejudice".
fwiw, it's not so much that Persian is spoken in Tajikistan, it's that the Tajiks are a Persian people (as opposed to, in that part of the world, Turkic, Mongolic, or Hindi (Hindi and Urdu are the same languages, and Hindi and Persian are in the same broad language family, Indo-Iranian)
I admit I know barely anything about the subject (but I took an interest in Burton as a younger man): is The Perfumed Garden not "dirty", ie erotic literature?
I recall the One-Thousand-and-One Nights being quite bawdy (talking about lusting after well-endowed servants, IIRC); maybe that's not authentic Persian literature though?
Maybe I misunderstood "nobody has ever read or heard about it"?
Can you help me better understand your comment, thanks.
The current 1001 nights is Arabic and the Middle Persian one is lost. Nevertheless, it is a pre-islamic literature. Perfumed Garden is Arabic and has just been recently translated into Persian.
New Persian literature starts around Rudaki (9th century). Since Islam made sex and showing affection taboo, the tiny fraction of explicit erotica are not studied/known by the general public. Because of the taboo, majority of Persians have not ever heard their parents speak affectionately. And when we study affectionate literature in school the teachers tell us it's about the love for God, and the exams will question us about such love.
In Russian you can sometimes jokingly call someone like a friend or a partner "вы" + their first and middle (father's) name. It makes you sound kinda important.
Not in mine. But you surely build a barrier of “respect”, I learned that early in my career. I was too formal and “too respectful”, that built a barrier with many people, a barrier other teammates didn’t have. That barrier can be useful though, but you need to be aware of it.
The Wikipedia article linked lists several types of T-V distinctions. Some are based on age, others on age difference, social status, and many more subtle factors. They also change very quickly: my parents speak to their parents with V but I do with T.
Formal Farsi borders on being its own dialect. I grew up only learning informal "street" Farsi, and find formal Farsi to be almost impenetrable (granted I've never tried to learn it).
Russian is my native language and it does also have this distinction (ты/вы). For me, there's not really any issue with that, not so much that I would want to remove this distinction. It's very clear to me most of the time which pronoun to call someone. Yes, it depends on a lot of context, but I've been making these decisions every day for all my life so it's not that hard.
In your example about work, I'd just always use "ты" without giving it a second thought, and wouldn't mind others using it to address me. Maybe it's just our culture that has a more lax attitude towards it, I don't know.
The only case that I find kinda cringy is when people (rarely) call bartenders and waiters "ты". For me it's very clear that when a person you don't know serves you, it should be "вы".
> This felt to me like one of the reasons why English became the dominant language for business over time.
Probably not. English is messy when it comes to pronunciation and irregular verbs, not exactly the easiest language to learn.
English became the dominant business language for reasons unrelated to the English language itself but because of the relative power of the people who spoke the language.
Compare English with Esperanto, which, in spite of being much easier to learn than English, still hasn't become anywhere near as widespread (at least in terms of number of speakers).
Ironically the one biggest thing which presents an ideological advantage for Esperanto is that it's native to no nation, so all the people who speak it are closer to being equals in that regard; yet it is the imperialism and a large number of native speakers which has helped to make English so prevalent. So just being technically and morally superior doesn't win you adoption by a long shot, even if you try.
And it may be of note for this post that the original author of Esperanto was very conscious of this whole formal/informal issue, which is why he opted to introduce only the plural second person pronoun into practice.
In general? No, of course not; I feel that would be an absurd claim to make.
But as an international language? I think having everyone learn something that is comparatively easy to learn is certainly more fair than having most people learn something that is comparatively hard to learn and understood by others from the get-go, thereby giving the latter an unfair advantage. And I feel that being more fair in this regard is indeed morally superior.
(Then again, that might just boil down to one's own idea of morality. But I feel like this one shouldn't be all too uncommon, and the claim is entirely reasonable in its terms.)
Esperanto may not be native to any nation, but as far as I'm aware, it's heavily influenced by Latin and various European languages.
Not saying that this is it's main problem, and other constructed languages like Lojban are probably even less relevant despite trying to be more "culturally neutral".
Yes, you are entirely correct. Making a language that’s fully ‘culturally neutral’ is likely impossible, but even so, Esperanto could have done much better in this regard (and as far as I know, some other constructed languages do much better in this regard).
Even then, it's a very big jump from ‘people in some countries already know this and don’t need to learn at all’ to ‘people in some countries will have an easier time learning since they’ll recognise a lot of the words’; making this jump would already be a great improvement upon the status quo. Out of the languages which make the jump, Esperanto is by far the most widely spoken and otherwise used in practice.
Depends on your level of abstraction, I guess. GP stated "We all speak English because at one point the English practically owned the entire planet."
Which in our case is false. We stopped learning German as a second language because of the Nazi aggression and atrocities during WW2, and started learning English as a second language due to their aid and closer relations during the war.
But yes, it's obviously not because of any linguistic merit.
It would help if we knew which country. Was this due to (1) pre-WW2 German language mostly useful for trade with Germany, or (2) a significant minority of ethnic Germans, who probably returned to Germany (E/W) after WW2? My guess: #2.
It is a bit more complex than that. My father (American) learned German because his mother considered it "the language of science". That attitude is mostly gone.
When I studied computer science (which, at my university in the United States was still a part of the mathematics faculty), we were required to study one of German, French, or Russian, as those were historical languages of math.
Seems a bit quaint now - but at least it got me to learn German and even spend six months studying at the University of Heidelberg.
> It is a bit more complex than that. My father (American) learned German because his mother considered it "the language of science". That attitude is mostly gone.
When my dad did his chemistry degrees (a bachelors and a masters by research) in the late 1960s / early 1970s (Australia), they made him do a unit on how to read German, because that is the language of a lot of the older chemistry literature. I don’t think they care anywhere near as much about German in chemistry nowadays, although (from what I understand) learning to read German is still an expectation for some humanities PhDs (such as Egyptology)
The competition was very aggressive, escalating into several Anglo-Dutch wars. The VOC absolutely outcompeted the EIC most of the time. How do you explain the staying power of English given that “imperialism” is the more appropriate context, not “British Imperialism”?
English became the lingua franca of science because of the decline of German science following the world wars. English became the language of commerce due to the commercial dominance of first the British Empire and then the United States.
So still not really due to some intrinsic merits of the language.
The anglos won the world wars due to the intrinsic merits of english, not only because war itself requires communication, but also because they were able to mobilize more resources, including the resources of a country full of recent immigrants, who had all already learned english.
But English was dominant because the people who were dominant in those areas spoke English. It’s because of that previous dominance that the allies (you forgot the Soviet Union, China, the Netherlands, and France among others btw) were able to build on that dominance and succeed. Their success built into the post-war growth of English and the US, as they were undamaged and recovered quickly. So I would say that English is dominant because of the back to back successes of English speaking countries, not that their success is because of English.
Don’t forget about Hollywood and the dominance of English-speaking media. And English has been the lingua franca of the Internet. I travelled a bit before the mid 90s and not as many people spoke English in many places as do today.
Is it culturally English speaking to think this just sounds like social anxiety rather than an expected norm?
If someone thought they were superior than me and expected a particular greeting or whatever, I'd tell them where to shove it lol
If you take a complicated social issue and reduce it until it becomes a one-dimensional question, of course it sounds stupid.
Imagine a foreigner learning English and asking "Why do I have to care if people are male or female? What a sexist language! Nobody cares about genitals in my culture!" And they start to refer to everybody as "he", regardless of, well, genitals.
They won't come across as more enlightened, transcending the shackles of sexist English grammar.
They will simply sound like a poor English speaker.
It's besides the point, but a slight correction: you wouldn't assume someone's preferred pronouns from details about their genitals (it'd be offensive to ask or try to check!), but from how they present them self - through gendered appearance or perhaps by just stating it.
If I assumed any woman wearing pants and a tshirt wants to be called a man, I'd offend them more often than not. Guessing somebody is transgender because they aren't conforming to gendered fashion conventions is an extremely bad idea.
The parent wasn't just talking about the top-level of their clothes, though, but about overall presentation. There's generally a lot more cultural signifiers embedded that you can cue off of than just "pants or skirt?" after all. Haircuts (highly gendered even at similar lengths), subtleties of makeup and jewelry, the cut of the aforementioned t-shirt and pants, body language, etc. (And there's still room to get it wrong, of course. But fortunately people who're living in the gray areas are generally aware they're doing so.)
Explaining all the details of how to distinguish e.g. a butch lesbian from a trans man to someone from a different cultural tradition is, of course, an incredible pain.
I've known plenty of women with male or gender neutral clothing, "boy cut" hair and no interest in jewelry. They weren't men. Assuming that a woman is transgender because she isn't "girly" is idiotic.
The number of people, particularly women, who don't adhere to gendered fashion greatly exceeds the number of transgender people.
In english workplaces there's still a "heirarchy" it's just not expressed with that one specific word.
If you'd phrase an email differently to a high-level exec vs your coworker, you've experienced it. Same with dressing differently to meet a new client vs an old friendly one. Both cases where you'd probably use the formal and informal depending on who you're talking to.
I remember the first time I was referred to as "sir" after moving to the UK from Norway.
In Norway it's now rare to come across the equivalent "Herr" other than as an insult (implying you're stuck up), outside of very limited cases, such as instead of "Mr", but that use too is in steep decline.
English is full of ways to express implied hierarchy through different wording / tone without the T-V distinction.
Good for you if you live in a culture without strong T-V distinction. Not using the correct form of address will make you need perceived as impolite in the best case or highly disrespectful and confrontational in the worst case, and you will land on their sh*t list. This can be dangerous if you have to interact with police!
PS: even in English, you're probably not using as many F-bombs and S-bombs when you talk to powerful people.
Using polite/formal grammar form is just something that comes completely naturally to native speakers, who practiced it their whole lives, in particular the entire childhood while speaking to adults. It does not put you in a position of inferiority or submission, people will still have nasty arguments or explicitly insult each other while maintaining formal grammar form.
This is very ignorant towards many cultures and such behavior would be actively harming your career in most places I've got to know. You're lucky to be in a place where your lack of empathy towards local etiquette does not result in more peer pressure, for better or for worse.
No idea why you are being downvoted. I think people in some circles and some places hold strongly to their newly crafted dogmas.
No one is equal to no one. I do not see how this can be taken badly at all : absence of equality does not equate to lack of intrinsic merit.
As to the main topic : I think some degree of deference to some people, represented by some specific words, is a good thing, as long as it does not fall into some Byzantine rules that make communication less efficient.
T-V culture is speaking for years in periphrases and passive tense to a semi-acquaintance when you're not sure which form to use and too much time has passed that it's now awkward to ask.
I’m in a comical situation that me and my Mexican father-in-law mutually refer to each other as usted despite the fact we’d both be better off switching to informal, except for the fact that neither of us want to offend the other by being so casual.
> you should all speak Chinese now, whose words don't change forms at all
There are some inflectional elements in Chinese.
Speaking for Mandarin:
- Verbs may be inflected into one of three aspects, with the suffixes 着 (progressive), 了 (perfective), or 过 (experiential).
- Certain verbs may be inflected for possibility or impossibility, with the infix 得 (for possibility) or 不 (for impossibility). If the verb is not naturally part of the category that participates in this construction, the dummy particle 了 (which shares spelling, but not pronunciation, with the perfect suffix mentioned above) must be supplied, to convert it into that category.
- Nouns may be inflected for plurality with the suffix 们. As I understand it, this is only really appropriate where the noun refers to a collection of people (broadly defined), but any such noun may receive the suffix.
Yeah but doesn't the way you intone a word change the meaning entirely? With how heavy accents are the norm for English second speakers I would think this makes Chinese practically impossible to learn to pronounce. Also 90% of the world can read the latin alphabet already which is a good start when learning a new language. Years ago I made a small attempt to learn some Russian and Cyrillic was like smashing against a brick wall, I imagine it's 200x worse for Chinese since you have to learn 5000 new characters.
In Finnish the formal (second person plural) is almost gone. It's mostly in ceremonial use, or used as a quirk. In Swedish the formal is even more extinct and there was an active campaign to eradicate it in the 1970s.
This so untrue I had to make an account to reply to you.
Quebec french is standardised by the OQLF (Office Québécois de la Langue Française) and the formal/informal distinction is as important in our french as it is in other cultures. The reason it might seem less common is because most conversations people have are informal. In formal settings, it is still expected of people to use "vous" rather than "tu". It is seen as polite and some people might even take offence to the informal being used when they do not know their interlocutor personally.
In spoken French, in cases of unfamiliarity it would be more common in France to use the formal “vous” than in a place like Montreal where you’ll see “tu” still used.
When I say it “seems to be in the process” it’s because of how I’ve heard the language spoken. (Admittedly in Montreal and French Ontario and not other parts of Quebec).
Popular French (from France!) YouTuber Loïc Suberville actually notes this difference in a video a couple weeks ago (jump to 1:25 ish).
It’s something he noticed as a “metro French” speaker. And he’s made a career now out of looking at the absurdities of spoken language.
Yes there is an official “language board” but that’s aspirational and not a law. Language is a reflection of how people use it.
I agree that in a formal conversation people will use “vous” (and we see similar splits of language in English “on the news” vs what people actually use), but there’s way less use of “vous” in Quebec for a lot of situations.
The part where you say we are dropping it. It is very much alive and just as confusing as ever for settings that are on the fence. I positively hate it. I can't count the number of times where I heard (roughly): Can I continue speaking with you using "tu"?
When I was in high school (10y ago) we were forced to use "vous" when speaking to an adult.
There's something ironic here when the nuance of language is lost. Saying something "seems" a certain way is a personal observation. "It seems colder in this room" isn't a false statement if the room is measured and it wasn't actually colder.
> Quebec French seems to be in the process of dropping the formal.
I stand by it. It's an observation from speaking to people. They use 'vous' much less. And it's a comment on the process -- the shift.
> I positively hate it. I can't count the number of times where I heard (roughly): Can I continue speaking with you using "tu"?
I think you're agreeing with me? If situations where the question of whether or not the "formal" is required is becoming less and less inherently obvious, then that's an indicator of the shift. People want to use the comfortable form.
> When I was in high school (10y ago) we were forced to use "vous" when speaking to an adult.
Do you think that younger persons use the form "vous" less and less? Or do you think that they use it just as much as your age group?
That's literally the "process" of language -- the younger dictate the rules. Language shifts. And I suspect the high school curriculum is an attempt to 'standardise' and for the 'proper' ways -- but things like the internet and casual speak will work against it. And formal forms may get relegated to professional situations. And, contrary to the poster that said it can seem impolite, I'd argue that one can see the use of the 'formal' forms as "stuck up".
> It’s way less common there than metro/france French.
I think this is actually the statement that could be empirically analyzed if desired. I'm basing it on what metropolitan French speakers say about Quebec French.
(eg in the language video).
And since we're talking about "observations of the language" the anecdotes there may be useful.
I noticed a comment that criticized the assertion regarding tu/vous:
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzNHyk2JAas&lc=UgzgxoXEIhDXa...)
"Wow je suis honnêtement surpris par la fidélité de cette vidéo! Malgré quelques erreurs (notamment qu'on utilise aussi le vous pour parler aux inconnus et parfois même à ses parents/grand-parents, et que tous les Canadiens Français ne sont pas Québécois) tout est véridique, bravo! En plus c'était très divertissant de voir ma culture exposée par un représentant Français qui a fait ses recherches. Il faudrait juste revoir l'imitation de l'accent"
A response:
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzNHyk2JAas&lc=UgzgxoXEIhDXa...)
"Va en France et tu vas voir que le "vous" est beaucoup plus présent qu'ici. Le vouvoiement est quasi institutionalisé là-bas alors qu'ici c'est un peu laissé chacun pour soi"
And a response to that:
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzNHyk2JAas&lc=UgzgxoXEIhDXa...)
"En effet, cela dépend beaucoup de la génération et de l'éducation de chacun. Les jeunes ont tendance à tutoyer davantage que les plus âgés. Mes parents (nés dans les années 1920) vouvoyaient leurs parents qui eux se vouvoyaient entre eux. Ma génération (année 60) va tutoyer plus souvent. Je tutoie les plus jeunes mais je vouvoie les plus vieux. Dans les écoles, souvent à l'école primaire les enfants apprennent à tutoyer leurs enseignants. Au secondaire, le vous est habituellement de rigueur. Je suis commis dans un magasin et je vouvoie les clients jeunes ou vieux. Avant d'être commis, j'étais enseignant... maintenant à la retraite. Les jeunes nous approchent souvent en tutoyant... cela me dérange beaucoup. De même, quand je suis client et qu'un commis me tutoie ça m'énerve."
They essentially say that they observe it being used less and less for younger people. That's my observation as well.
So yes, it does seem to me like quebec french is in the process of dropping it. The reduction in usage and relegation to certain settings will be a part of that process. I don't think the "official" language boards get to decide.
I'm pretty sure they were talking about their impression of trends regarding how people actually talk, not how some literal language lawyers demand they speak. Whether they're actually correct or not, I have no idea and it's beside the point.
Huh, having learned Spanish as a non-native speaker, I was taught that the two forms had more to do with the closeness of the relationship than they did with some sort of social rank or superiority.
For example, a family member who you would address as "sir" (at least in the Southern U.S.), maybe a parent or grandparent, might be taken aback if you addressed them with the formal "usted" in Spanish, because it didn't imply respect, but that you didn't consider the person close. Another example would be prayer, where God is definitely superior to us, but you would address Him with the less formal "tu", because the love He has for us makes that a close and personal relationship. (I'm not even sure that the word "formal" is the right one to use here, as like I say, it's not quite the same as in English.)
You could also have a business conversation where you'd use "usted" without necessarily implying respect, because "tu" sounds out of place for a distant relationship like that. (I.e. using "tu" wouldn't be disrespectful, so much as it would just be weird or akward.)
Am I misunderstanding the usage of the two forms, or could someone enlighten me a bit more on the subject? Is the dynamic similar in other T-V languages, or is it used more to denote social status/tiers?
Not sure about Spanish, but in Slavic/Germanic languages it's as OP says, the plural form tends to show more respect for e.g. talking to a stranger, especially an older one. Students typically address teachers this way and teachers don't do it in return, until university where students are considered old enough and it's typically done mutually. People of the same age that know each other almost always just use singular form.
There are actually three forms if we're completely exact: singular 2nd person, plural 2nd person, and plural 3rd person. German uses the first and last, Slavic languages have all three but the third is very dated and practically unused by now.
It is not that easy and depends a lot on context. I know people who use "usted" to their grandparents (who use "tu" in returns), but at the same time you have lots of shops where they will say "tu" to their customers (particularly clothing, not so much for restaurants). Depends a lot of the country/region and even family.
Thank you to those who responded! If you happen to see this, do you know if the behavior you describe is more common in Europe, rather than the Americas? (Just out of curiosity.) Most of the people I know who speak Spanish are from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean (Puerto Rico or Cuba), and occasionally from South America. Rarely do I get to meet people from other areas, so I'm not sure if this is something I've failed to notice, or if it's maybe due to a regional difference.
Also, am I correct in my understanding that prayer is done nearly universally in "tu"? (I know some Argentinos who use "vos" for informal circumstances, but still use "tu" for prayer, but rarely anywhere else.) Could you help me to better understand the reasons behind this?
Thank you again for your response! It's a beautiful thing to have the opportunity to learn about other cultures from the people who live them.
I have a colleague who comes from a culture with a T-V distinction and lives in France where it also exists. But the line we would draw between "toi" and "vous" in French is quite different from his culture: he apparently has a more formal "framework" for T-V and he uses "vous" much more often than others would, so it often creates some distance.
So, T-V distinction is also very cultural in a sense where the line between the two is.
Thing is, it's not like the semantics and tone of formal speaking or speaking with deference is missing in English. It just doesn't take the form of special pronouns or conjugations, etc.
Native speakers at least are capable of picking up on all sorts of nuance in word choice and tone
Give it a couple hundred years, all the subtle or not-so-subtle nuances will standardize and settle into grammar constructs.
In Flanders, Belgium there is a slow adoption of T.
But what is weird is that the V is used in BOTH contexts. The T is used in the Netherlands but slowly more and more people in Flanders are adopting the T version in written language.
And it irks me. Companies sending you a letter addressing you with the T version, like we're friends.
I don't want to be addressed by V for reasons of respect. I don't want to be addressed with T for reasons of not wanting to be infantilized.
Education has been trying to kill the "ge/gij" form for decades by ignoring its existence. In Flanders, they are not really succeeding. Everybody still uses it in spoken form. However, the number of people knowing how to conjugate it properly in written form is decreasing. "Gij hadt" fe, is correct but rarely encountered .
Do you know why education is trying to do this? I find that as it infiltrates business communication that it encourages a language that sounds like we're friends. We're not. I'm a person. You're a company who is overcharging me for basic things like internet. No need for informal cosy language.
(now try the past tense, there's plenty of weird stuff with strong verbs "zijn"
becomes "Gij waart").
To answer the question: everything language related is dominated by the Dutch. Take fe dictionaries. Van Dale dominates the market and has a habit of annotating everything that's not considered "proper" Dutch as "Belg.Nl."
I have a feeling Flemish Dutch and Dutch Dutch were more one language in the 1970s than now. They're drifting apart.
The T form (jij/je) sounds infantile in Flemish because it is infantile. The real T form in Flemish is gij/ge. But it's somewhat archaic and some people look down on it, so it's rarely used in written conversation. In many cases, the jij/je-form is used when talking to children or used by children. Once they grow up a bit, they tend to use the gij/ge form for informal conversation, and jij/je for slightly more polite conversation.
It's a bit different in the Netherlands, where the archaic forms are more rare outside of Brabant, and where reality more closely matches the textbook T-forms.
Companies addressing me using the infantile form doesn't bother me. What I find much more annoying is companies trying to be cutesy, with random slang thrown in their communications It always gives me "How do you do, fellow kids"-vibes.
I only very rarely encounter anyone talking in the V-forms. It's more common in the written form.
Being a bit of a contrarian, I refuse to write in the jij/je T-form, and consistently stick to the archaic gij/ge.
TL;DR: Flemish has 2 T-forms and one V-form, but the newer T-form is sometimes a V-form. Languages are fun.
First of all, thanks for reminding me about ge/gij. I am born in Flanders, raised in Flemish, and lived there for 28 years and I forgot about that.
When I was growing up people did not address me with je/jij. My mom was a teacher. Ge/gij all the time.
And if you want to be polite you would switch to u/u.
And I get the same vibes as you do. But since ge/gij is not suitable for formal communication I insist on using u/u. This also increases the barrier to use any kind of infantile cosy language.
I'm the author of the top answer, and I believe that this is the top-voted thing that I ever posted on any StackExchange site. It was a lovely surprise to see it here today, and I hope that everyone else enjoyed reading it. Merry Christmas!
Every few weeks or so the last decade, someone has upvoted the question. Always interesting to see the difference between this question and essentially everything else I've ever written.
Thanks for the answer btw, it was enlightening. I can't help but remember the first lines in my mind each time I get the upvote notification ("Drumroll... !").
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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'.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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".
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> This explains a peculiarity of traditional Quaker speech, which one often hears in films set in the early Americas. The Quakers opposed making any distinctions of rank, so they insisted on addressing everyone as thou, not as you. The irony is that today we perceive thou to be archaic and formal, while the original intent is to be more informal.
In german, the distinction between formal and informal address is disappearing into the informal address. It's interesting that the Quakers also tried this, but that in english (the first language were this distinction disappeared?) it ultimatly disappeared into the formal address.
I wonder if it in part has to do with English's overall status as a "second class" or even "lower class" language even in its own native land during the years after the Norman invasion. Up until a certain point the aristocracy spoke mostly Norman French, and even after they switched to English they did so with a form heavily filled with French loans and written with French-derived orthography.
What I mean to say is, if the language is on the whole not the language of the nobility, even the formal pronouns would not be perceived as elevated, really. If you really wanted to impress, you'd switch to French (or even Latin, etc.)
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.
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).
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.
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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.
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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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
"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.'
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 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.
"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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am learning European Portuguese, which very much still has formal vs informal and interestingly, using Você (formal singular second person) can actually be insulting, as I think it means you think the other person is old.
So they drop the Você but still use the formal verb conjugation.
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 German, we have the formal "Sie" and the informal "du". The formal means of address is dying incredibly fast. It's been a huge change just in the past 10 years or so. I'm not a linguist, but I'm pretty sure this is due to the influence of English, which is everywhere.
Just as an example: as a gray-haired professor, I use "du" and my first name with my students. I may be an outlier in my generation, but that is entirely normal for younger colleagues. 10 years ago, that would have been...strange. 20 years ago, it was unheard of.
I used “Sie” with my now mother- and father-in-law until the first time I visited them after we got engaged and my mother-in-law brought out a bottle of sparkling wine and asked if we could be on “du” terms. That was when I started using their first names.
That was in 2008, and was, from what I gather, already rather old-fashioned. It was common enough in the past that there’s a verb for it that my mother-in-law used when making the offer: duzen.
I think English definitely has it's influence but I think another big factor is the general idea that this hierarchic thinking just gets outdated and younger Germans strive to have a sense of equality.
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".
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.
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?)
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!”)
I think about what’s discussed often as it relates to euphemisms. For example, exonyms for minorities or disabled people changes all the time. My theory is that euphemisms are “disposable” in that they start “clean” with no external meaning or definition and therefore can’t be perceived as negative. Over time, it absorbs meaning and context and eventually it becomes as “dirty” as word it supplanted and the cycle continues.
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)
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 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.
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)
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.
On a side note, I always thought the absence of "formal you" made english-speaking countries more laid-back. This is usually a good thing, because it makes ideas and information circulate more smoothly.
But like everything, it has some drawbacks : the constant need to level everything and to some kind of hypocrisy.
I have nothing to back my intuition on, just some Sapir-Whorfish reasoning...
I'm trying to learn German and though it's probably frowned upon, I would prefer to just use "Sie" for everything because it's less to remember and just simplifies so many things. I wonder if my ancestors had the same thoughts, which is how the formal "You" just took over as the only thing we really use in English.
Maybe it was because if you were meeting unknown person you might verbally assume they are a part of some group. Either to put them at ease so they know they are not perceived as lonely prey or to safeguard yourself by communicating that you are aware and prepared that more of them might be hiding in the bushes.
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.
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.
Reminds me of the Japanese pronoun 君 (pronounced "ki-mi"). The nuance is surprisingly similar (appropriate for lovers & underlings, almost never strangers), cultural & geographical gaps notwithstanding.
Makes you wonder what kind of wires must get crossed in the human id for intimate pronouns to function this way.
I grew up in the Soviet Union, and once when I was being particularly terrible my mom informed me that English-speaking children are probably much better, and that they even address their parents as вы (you-polite).
I thought "you" was the formal version and "thou" was informal. Didn't read the article though. No time right now but I'll do so later.
I'm happy more languages drop this formal stuff though. In Dutch it's also pretty uncommon now to say "U". And I like it.
In fact it used to be much worse, when I was young every agenda came with a whole page of formal verbiage for people of different roles (like ministers, judges and other officials). I don't think anyone uses that stuff anymore.
This is kind of interesting when you think of what would happen if someone decided to "impose" the use of "you" instead of "thou".
In English it happened organically.
Take communist Poland, for example. The ruling party was all about changing how people talked, pushing words like "comrade" and all. But their attempt to make people use the plural form for a single person totally backfired (as did the use of "comrade"). It felt so out of place that when communism fell, the old way of speaking came roaring back and the distinction between "thou" and "you" is now stronger than ever before. Just goes to show, some things you just shouldn't be forced. Language change is definitely one of those things.
Makes me wonder in what interesting ways the current wave of English language manipulation (neo-pronouns, "blocklists" etc.) will backfire.
I’d hardly say this is “precedent” for something that’s been done since the beginning of the language. (The Canterbury Tales are generally considered the threshold between old and modern English and they use singular “they”.)
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 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.
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 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
The informal T vs formal V causes confusion in conversation with semi-strangers. Eg. At work you never really know which way to speak to someone at a watercooler. If you choose the informal T you make them your equal. Ehich might be perceived as insulting to them, since they might want to keep a perception of superiority to you for eg. being older, more tenured, etc. Often you'd rather choose not to even engage in a conversation and just keep your thoughts to yourself. Better than ending up in a inferior position when choosing the safe V, or risking insulting someone when using the informal T form.
This felt to me like one of the reasons why English became the dominant language for business over time. Together with simplified morphology (you only need to learn the plural by adding 's' at the end, vs. 5+ other tenses of each word) it just ended up being much easier to pick up and less risky to engage in conversations and therefore higher chances of adoption by non-speakers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%E2%80%93V_distinction