English used to have dual pronouns (what the article is a about), proper accusatives and genitives (she/her/hers, who/whom and the apostrophe-s genitive are survivors), formal/informal 2nd person pronouns (you / thou) and quite a few other things that come up when you learn French or Latin.
Yes/No and Yea/Nay used to mean different things too: "Is this correct?" could be answered "Yea, it is correct" whereas "Is this not a mistake?" could be answered "Yes, it is correct" (which you can also parse by taking the 'not' literally).
"Courts martial" and "secretaries general" are examples where the original noun-first word order remains.
pdpi 1 days ago [-]
The formal/informal second person thing is fascinating to me as a Portuguese speaker.
European Portuguese, like many (most?) Romance languages, has the informal/formal second person split. Brazilian Portuguese has dropped the informal second person (tu) and uses only the formal second person (você).
Now, because “thou” is archaic, it sounds overly stiff, and most English speakers assume it was the formal second person, but it was actually the informal form. So both Brazilian Portuguese and English underwent the same process and chose the same way.
Sharlin 1 days ago [-]
In English particularly, people associate "thou" with the King James Bible and similar Christian texts ("Our Father, thou art in Heaven…") and might reasonably assume that if "thou" was used to address the literal God, it must have been the formal pronoun – but the familial, informal one was used exactly because of the "father" association! (OTOH there certainly are languages with a tu/vous distinction where children were expected to "vous" their own parents – not sure how much of a thing it is these days).
Another fun thing is that calling someone you don't know "thou" used to be an intentional insult ("you're not worthy of being called 'you'"), something that might be missed by a modern reader of Shakespeare or other EME texts.
aardvark179 24 hours ago [-]
It depends a lot on where you were brought up, and the language you were exposed to. My first association would be a very Yorkshire, “Thou knowest,” rather than the king james.
gerdesj 22 hours ago [-]
... thar knows nowt!
ErroneousBosh 24 hours ago [-]
> (OTOH there certainly are languages with a tu/vous distinction where children were expected to "vous" their own parents – not sure how much of a thing it is these days).
It's interesting that in Viennese German (my German is terrible but I do at least try) it seems like the informal form is the default, in a shop I get asked "Braucht du hilfe?" rather than the formal "Kann ich Ihnen helfen?".
Maybe this is what they mean when they say people in Vienna are rude, but coming from Scotland using informal language even in fairly serious settings just seems comfortable and normal.
avadodin 20 hours ago [-]
This can also change with the times —as in, within living memory.
My grandma used the formal address when reminiscing about going to the bakery when she was young but in the present she would use the familiar form and even the clerks would use a fake formal at best if they were feeling particularly grateful for having a job that day.
andrepd 1 days ago [-]
Also, "você" is actually not originally a proper formal second person. Grammatically, "você" is a third person singular. It comes from "Vossa Mercê" (something like "Your Mercy" or "Your Grace"), shortened to "vossemeçê", to "você". The origin, and still today a common gramatical construction in Portuguese in any formal or semi-formal register, is to use a periphrase in the third person to increase politeness. I guess in English it also exists, but only on the most fully formal contexts ("Does that right honourable gentleman agree...").
madcaptenor 1 days ago [-]
Similarly, Spanish "vuestra merced" evolved to "usted".
zoky 24 hours ago [-]
And likewise the Romanian “dumneavoastră” evolved into… nothing, that’s still the polite form of “you” in Romanian. Interestingly though, it can be used in both the singular and plural, and takes verbs conjugated exactly the same way for both forms (i.e. the second person plural).
tsimionescu 17 hours ago [-]
Note that Romanian also has a second person singular formal pronoun, "dumneata", though it's use today is very rare and isn't actually considered polite. This is probably since Romanian, like most Romance languages, often omits the subject in phrases, so the real politeness marker ends up being just the use of second person plural verb forms to refer to a singular speaker ("mă puteți ajuta" is far more common instead of "dumneavoastră mă puteți ajuta" without the omitted subject, while the informal version is the singular "mă poți ajuta", which "dumneata mă poți ajuta" would also require - all of these phrases meaning "can [you] help me").
The origin for both is more "your lordship" ("domnia ta/voastră") than "your mercy", as well.
esquivalience 1 days ago [-]
As in 'please', from 'if you please'?
lemoncucumber 23 hours ago [-]
Early Quakers rejected using different 2nd person pronouns for different people since it violated their principle of egalitarianism so they called everyone thee/thou (and got into trouble for it as you might expect).
There's a wonderful story about William Penn (yes, the William Penn who founded Pennsylvania and after whom it was named) nearly getting into trouble for his Quaker beliefs, except that King Charles II graciously forgave him. The story made it into a biography of Charles's mistress Eleanor "Nell" Gwyn, and can be read here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Nell_Gwyn/Chapte...
Briefly, William Penn refused to take his hat off in the presence of King Charles, due to his Quaker beliefs in egalitarianism. This would have gotten him into very serious trouble for lèse-majesté, except that the king took his own hat off. "Friend Charles," said Penn (who had apparently never heard of the saying that when you're in a hole you should stop digging), "why dost thou not keep on thy hat?" And King Charles II replied, "'Tis the custom of this place that only one person should be covered at a time." Of course, normally it was the king who would keep his crown on. But after Charles said that, nobody in the court could bring a charge of lèse-majesté against William Penn for the incident.
zamadatix 2 hours ago [-]
Thanks for sharing! That was a fantastic read.
For anyone not wanting to read through it all, the story in the conclusion of the chapter was a particularly good laugh:
> I have referred in a former chapter to the King's partiality for his dogs; one species of which is still celebrated among the fancy as King Charles's breed. On the occasion of an entry into Salisbury, an honest Cavalier pressed forward to see him, and came so near the coach that his Majesty cautioned the poor man not to cling too close to the door lest one of the little black spaniels in the coach should chance to bite him. The loyalist still persisting in being near, a spaniel seized him by the finger, and the sufferer cried with a loud voice, "God bless your Majesty, but G—d d—n your dogs!"
stevula 1 days ago [-]
I thought courts martial and secretaries general (and Knights Templar/Hospitaller, et al) were Anglo-Norman/French borrowings. Do you have any examples of native English phrases following that pattern?
gerdesj 22 hours ago [-]
A relative presided over a couple of court martials (1) in the past. Modern usage has largely disconnected it from the past, grammatically (if that is even a thing, except to the true minutaephile)!
This sucks because yes its a mistake or no its not a mistake both fit
adammarples 1 days ago [-]
they don't fit, because 'yes' was not supposed to be used in the context of 'yes it is a mistake', yea was. Having two words helped stop that ambiguity.
Yes contradicts the negative question. So "Is this not a mistake?" should be contradicted with "yes, it is a mistake" or affirmed with "no, it is not a mistake".
It's further confusing because we have the idiom of suggesting things politely in a tentative manner such as isn't this a mistake? which has lost its sense of negativity and has come to mean "this is a mistake, I think," as opposed to being parsed literally to mean "this is not-a-mistake, I think".
FabHK 14 hours ago [-]
Very interesting.
From Wikipedia:
> English had a four-form system, comprising the words yea, nay, yes, and no. Yes contradicts a negatively formulated question, No affirms it; Yea affirms a positively formulated question, Nay contradicts it.
> Will they not go? — Yes, they will.
> Will they not go? — No, they will not.
> Will they go? — Yea, they will.
> Will they go? — Nay, they will not.
So, this has obviously simplified. But what I find interesting is that English speakers from the Philippines or from a Russian background chose differently (where SME is standard modern English, and PRE is Philippine/"Russian" English):
Will they not go? — SME: Yes, they will. PRE: No, they will. [Not sure about that one.]
Will they not go? — SME: No, they will not. PRE: Yes, they will not. [I hear this all the time from non-native English speakers.]
Will they go? — SME/PRE: Yes, they will.
Will they go? — SME/PRE: No, they will not.
ETA from Wikipedia :-)
> In December 1993, a witness in a court in Stirlingshire, Scotland, answered "aye" to confirm he was the person summoned, but was told by a sheriff judge that he must answer either yes or no, or else be held in contempt of court. When asked if he understood, he replied "aye" again, and was imprisoned for 90 minutes for contempt of court. On his release he said, "I genuinely thought I was answering him."
FarmerPotato 1 days ago [-]
I'm trying to parse the extra "not" in archaic holdovers vs plain modern English. It seems to carry a subtext.
Modern "Are you happy now?" is said with sarcastic tone, to spoil happiness. Would be archaically "Are you not happy?" As if to dare contradiction. It's loaded, unlike when saying sympathetically "Are you unhappy?"
Others:
"Are you not entertained?"
"Are you not the very same Smith that dwelt at Haversham?"
"Prick me, do I not bleed?"
But commonly:
"Are you not a Christian?" most likely seems direct, but said in a formal sense, "rhetorically", an exhortation to act like one.
LAC-Tech 21 hours ago [-]
It's worth noting that early on in English, þu/ģe (thou/ye) did not say anything about formality. It was just singular and plural.
matt-attack 1 days ago [-]
And we’ve literally born witness to yet another step in the trend of diluting our corpus of pronouns. The trend is very clearly from more articulate to less.
“They” and “their” for my whole lifetime were plurals. Now we’ve pretty much lost the mere clarity of knowing if the pronoun means 1 person or more than 1 person. Was watching “Adolescence” and the police mentioned “they” in regards to the victim of a crime. I was mistakenly under the impression that there weee multiple victims for much of the episode.
I’m very clearly slow to adapt to the new definitions.
w10-1 1 days ago [-]
The article points out that Chaucer used "they" to refer to singular unknown person, so the usage is very old. It seems more respectful than assuming they are male.
I find myself wrong all the time, and I'm glad for the lesson!
card_zero 1 days ago [-]
Leaning on Chaucer isn't sufficient, because it was once a pronoun used for people:
So maybe we should bring back it, or ignore Chaucer as an authority.
Hasnep 22 hours ago [-]
The point isn't that we should all speak like Chaucer, it's that singular they isn't a new thing within our lifetimes.
danielheath 21 hours ago [-]
I get what you’re saying, but Chaucer was not in _my_ lifetime.
DiogenesKynikos 20 hours ago [-]
"They" has been used as a singular pronoun continuously since Chaucer. Shakespeare used it. Dickens used it.
Even people who complain about the singular "they" use it when they're not paying attention. It's a regular part of the English language.
card_zero 19 hours ago [-]
But not with continuity, not popularly over that whole time span.
If it's something we're all accustomed to and comfortable with, why even mention that it was being used in the distant past? The article is trying to simultaneously argue "try this new term they, it's easy, everybody's saying it now, it's modern, you'll love it" and "this term is not at all strange and new, you're silly if you feel uncomfortable with it because it has always been used." It's trying to have it both ways in its wrangling.
Do people also casually use it to refer to humans, or is it just me?
DiogenesKynikos 11 hours ago [-]
In my experience, everyone who complains about the use of the singular "they" uses it themselves all the time when they're not thinking about it.
The reason why there's any debate at all about the singular they is not because it's new and strange. It's because beginning in the mid-18th century, influential grammar textbooks started discouraging its use and advocating "he" in its place. Many generations of kids have grown up being told in school that the singular "they" is wrong, but despite that, it has remained a very standard part of spoken English.
card_zero 4 hours ago [-]
Really, are you sure singular they was in widespread intemperate use, like today, prior to these influential Victorian grammarians?
OK, but they were influential, so they influenced the 1850s and subsequent decades, making this usage currently new and strange, because for a century or more people used he instead. Why deny that? To persuade them with the implication "we never got accustomed to saying he, turns out you didn't ever speak this way, it was just an illusion"?
I'm not sure what matters in persuading people to speak differently, but saying that a term is being revived, rather than being a complete neologism, is ... admittedly a little bit persuasive, but it doesn't much help with the glaring issue that it's still a major change from what we're used to: and there are additional valid complaints, firstly that it removes information, and secondly that it's used less sparingly than it was in the past. It's now commonly written, in formal texts where clarity matters.
This was for clarity in the phrasing of legislation.
I've picked up a rumor that this 1652 book encouraged the use of he in gender neutral contexts: https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1641-170... but I can't find where. It might just be an exaggeration based on the part where it says "The Maſculine is more worthy than the Feminine, and the Feminine is more worthy than the Neuter." But there's no doubt that the 17th century, never mind the 19th, was stuffed with sexist bastards in influential positions. So what's the use in pointing at the past, or even at the present, to say that some of the time they used they? Fundamentally you still have to argue for why, or why not.
Natfan 3 hours ago [-]
"my doctor gave me some bad news"
"oh, what did they say?"
---
"the wait staff messed up my order"
"how did they do that?"
HK-NC 5 hours ago [-]
I get what you're saying, but I found myself naturally doing this when talking about gender ambiguous animals or hypothetical people just because it made more sense. Nobody taught me this. Same with using "one" instead of "you", which I've never heard anyone do outside of ridiculing royalty.
1 days ago [-]
etskinner 1 days ago [-]
"They" has always (in our lifetimes) been used to refer to a singular person of unknown gender. For example "someone left their coat here. They must be cold"
the_biot 22 hours ago [-]
Indeed. What's new is not referring to someone of unknown gender as "they", but rather people identifying as non-gender-specific, and wanting to be referred to as "they". That's the part that feels so awkward, IMHO, not simply they as one person.
SoftTalker 20 hours ago [-]
No that's incorrect. Use his/he or her/she if the coat appears to be one that would be worn by a male or female. If uncertain, use male pronouns, which are gender neutral in that scenario.
Natfan 3 hours ago [-]
male pronouns wouldn't be the default to a woman.
explodes 20 hours ago [-]
There is a difference between "correct" and "how it is actually used by real people."
msla 15 hours ago [-]
Incorrect according to who? You? Your Sainted Mother? Sounds innovative to me, and hardly traditional. Saying male is somehow gender neutral sounds even more bizarre.
No, usage makes correctness in language, not people trying to invent some weird conlang they wrongly insist is correct English.
SoftTalker 4 hours ago [-]
> Incorrect according to who?
All my English teachers from Grades 1-12.
Using "they" as a singular pronoun would bring out the red pen.
laichzeit0 17 hours ago [-]
I must have missed the brief somewhere, but there was/is a very clear trend to replace the default male pronoun for gender neutrality with the female pronoun she. Just recently I noticed this in Judea Pearl’s Book of Why. When and why did this start happening? It feels so forced and unnatural. You can sense he’s trying to kiss someone’s ass or appease an authority. At least mix it up a bit at best if you truly give a crap.
FabHK 14 hours ago [-]
(It used to be "_borne_ witness", so fast enough in adapting to new ways?)
1 days ago [-]
psychoslave 1 days ago [-]
My biggest side project is about grammatical gender in French, published as a research project on wikiversity[1].
It did made me go through many topics, like dual, exclusive/inclusive group person.
Still in a corner of my head, there is the idea to introduce some more pronouns to handle more subtilty about which first person we are expressing about[2]. The ego is not the present attention, nor they are that thing intertwined with the rest of the world without which nothing exists.
[2] The project does provide an homogenized extended set of pronouns with 6 more than the two regular ones found in any primary school book. And completing all cases for all nouns is the biggest chunk that need to be completed, though it’s already done by now for the most frequent paradigms.
eigenspace 1 days ago [-]
I found this article quite interesting, and couldn't help but feel there's something that's emotionally lost when we got rid of the dual-forms. The example from Wulf and Eadwacer where "uncer giedd" was translated to "the song of the two of us".
Somehow that just doesn't land the same.
heresie-dabord 1 days ago [-]
> Somehow that just doesn't land the same.
I fear that a modern colloquial rendering would disappoint yet further:
our besties tune
FarmerPotato 1 days ago [-]
Certes, challenging to translate!
"Our secret song"
"Our shared song" is looser, though context helps.
"They're playing our song" still captures the timeless feeling. But is wrong for the poem.
zukzuk 1 days ago [-]
If you found this interesting, you might want to check out The History of the English Language podcast.
I’m surprised how much I’m enjoying it. And I can’t believe I have 195 episodes left.
iterateoften 1 days ago [-]
We still have in English: us-two and you-two and we-two.
Same number of syllables.
Maybe “Song of just us two”
Like it’s common to hear “You two better stay out of trouble”
Boy that unc/uncer looks tantalisingly close to modern German uns/unser. Wiktionary seems to have it descending from a different PIE root, n̥s vs n̥h -- I'm not at all familiar with PIE though.
shakna 1 days ago [-]
n̥ is just the "not" prefix. The "ero" is the real root. The prefix applies to the root first, and then the other pieces have their meanings, usually. (Its a reconstructed language. There are both exceptions and things we don't know.)
"n̥-s-ero-" is sort of < "not" next-is-plural "mine" >.
So, plural-(invert mine). Or roughly close to "we".
"n̥-h-ero-" is sort of < "not" next-is-inclusive-plural "mine" >.
So, plural-(group (invert mine)). Or roughly close to "us".
But both are pretty close to the same meaning. High German maintained a lot of PIE, and is very close in a lot of ways. Though... Welsh is closer.
zahlman 23 hours ago [-]
I feel like nasal sounds being associated with negation must be even older than PIE.
z500 1 days ago [-]
I've never heard of it being based on that root before. Do you have a source?
shakna 23 hours ago [-]
The two big ones for discussing Germanic languages and their inheritance would probably be:
"From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic", Ringe.
And the simpler "Lexikon der indogermanischen Partikeln und Pronominalstämme", Dunkel.
Both use "n̥-s-ero-", though in the more traditional /ˈun.se.rɑz/ form.
z500 9 hours ago [-]
Oh I've actually been meaning to get around to reading that first one. I'll have to crack that open.
kmm 1 days ago [-]
Curiously, Old English unc is actually not related to German uns, at least, not after the Germanic language family had already formed. Old English at some point underwent a sound change[1] where the -n- sound disappeared before fricatives (sounds like s, f, v, z, sh, etc...). So "us" comes from an older common form "uns", which German inherited basically unchanged. This sound change also explains other correspondences between English and German where the n is missing, like mouth-Mund, tooth-Zahn, other-ander, goose-Gans or five-fünf.
As a born German, now more native English speaker (left at 8), I agree. But, unless I'm very wrong, uns/unser in modern German is not restricted to 2 people either - it can mean 2 or more, as in "unsere Gemeinde" (our church, referring to something shared by hundreds of people)?
eigenspace 1 days ago [-]
That was my first thought too! So many things in old-english are very very close to modern German, so it's sometimes surprising to see these false-friends.
stvltvs 1 days ago [-]
Contrary to what GP said, they're not false friends. They're a (lost) part of English's Germanic roots, shared with modern German.
Edit: Check out the Proto-Germanic personal pronouns.
Based on the page you linked, they pretty clearly are false friends: Old English unc is unrelated to modern German uns, it is related instead to Old Germanic unk (while modern German uns is just Old Germanic uns).
stvltvs 7 hours ago [-]
I think this is straining the meaning of false friends. They are derived from closely related forms and differ only slightly in meaning: "to us two" versus "to us all". I guess if you see that as a significant difference, but a more typical example would be English parents vuersus Italian parenti meaning kin.
tsimionescu 3 hours ago [-]
I would argue that parents / parenti are also closely related meanings and closely related forms (and Italian parenti ultimately derives from the exact same root as English parents, the Latin parens meaning either parents or more generally ancestors). In contrast, uns and unc derive from separate PIE roots, while the semantic distinction was important in both PIE and Old Germanic.
shermantanktop 1 days ago [-]
Oh, you mean “Falsche Freunde”?
I have no idea how to say that idiomatically in German, but it struck me that those are both “true” friends.
pantalaimon 1 days ago [-]
Same with Ic - Ich
trinix912 1 days ago [-]
Slovene still has the grammatical dual and we still have (and use) pronouns that could literally be translated as "we two" (midva/midve) and "you two" (vidva/vidve) and so on. I've been told it used to be the same in most other Slavic languages.
nuxi 1 days ago [-]
There are still some remnants of this in Serbian and Croatian, e.g. the semi-dual "nas dvoje / nas dva".
huijzer 1 days ago [-]
Also sad is the fact that “you” is now used for “thee” and “thou” and such. The older variants could distinguish between “you” plural and “you” singular
ksherlock 1 days ago [-]
W'all have got y'all for plural you.
madcaptenor 1 days ago [-]
Before I moved to the South I (a non-Southerner) did not feel comfortable saying "y'all". But "you guys" seemed sexist. I have since spent a decade in the South and I have not picked up much of the dialect, but I definitely say "y'all" now.
"W'all" would be nice to have. I guess it's not a thing because it sounds too much like the things that separate rooms.
lamasery 1 days ago [-]
"Guys" (without a "the" in front of it) is uncontroversially gender-neutral in most contexts in at least some parts of the US. I'm not sure whether folks worried about it are from places where it's definitely not, or places where it's not used much at all so they're not aware that it's a non-issue in (at least many) places where it is.
I do prefer "y'all", though. I think it's the best one we've got, of the options ("yous" being another big one, and ew, gross)
I also love the nuance of "y'all" and "all y'all".
saltcured 1 days ago [-]
Have you yet progressed to y'all being singular and all y'all being plural?
madcaptenor 1 days ago [-]
No. As far as I can tell, singular "y'all", when it exists, is an implied plural. What you might hear as singular "y'all" is, say, when you go into a restaurant and say "do y'all have Coke?" to the server - that doesn't refer to just the server but to the restaurant as a whole. But I'm not a linguist and also I don't spend much time among people with heavier Southern dialect, so you shouldn't believe what I say.
saltcured 1 days ago [-]
I've had it explained to me as a western/eastern divide among southerners. As you head through Texas, more people think you need "all y'all" for plurals.
That's something those western southerners told me. I don't know if a linguist would agree, but that seems to be the understanding of some actual language users...
All I know is that there is a second boundary somewhere through TX, NM, and AZ, because I've never met a native Californian who would say "y'all" non ironically.
pessimizer 1 days ago [-]
No, you've got it right. A lot of people trying to be cute and make southern language seem more alien than it is are over-"correcting."
When southern people say y'all to one person, they're really addressing you and your family (even though you might be the only one there.) If I ask "how y'all doing?" I want to know how you and yours are doing.
macintux 1 days ago [-]
> If I ask "how y'all doing?" I want to know how you and yours are doing.
I just want people to stop asking me how I'm doing if they don't care.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that "How's it going" is a greeting, not an interrogative, and I want that change undone forever.
saltcured 1 days ago [-]
What's interesting is you may reply, "hey, how are you?", and lots of people may be satisfied with that. Neither party actually answers how they are, yet the handshake is complete.
macintux 1 days ago [-]
I refuse out of principle, but agree, that works.
I just use "Howdy".
ptmcc 1 days ago [-]
Which is short for "How do you do?"
macintux 1 days ago [-]
Good point! I guess my principles only extend so far.
FarmerPotato 23 hours ago [-]
Don't forget to end the conversation with "God be with ye". Or "A Dios".
chadd 1 days ago [-]
i tried to stop using y'all when i got my first job at MSFT, having grown up in the South; then 10 years later I realized it's perfect for Corporate America given it's gender neutral
kevin_thibedeau 1 days ago [-]
I grew up saying it and consciously eradicated it around 3rd grade. I probably shouldnt've but it would seem forced to do it now.
madcaptenor 1 days ago [-]
meanwhile, my New Jersey-born boss uses "you guys" despite herself being female and having lived in the South longer than I have
thechao 1 days ago [-]
You, y'all (small close group), y'all all (larger, further group), and "all y'all" — Southeast Texas (coastal) dialect form that showed up about 25 yrs ago. I suspect it might've been there all along, but only became acceptable at that point?
Another 100+ years, and this'll be some solid grammar.
gibspaulding 1 days ago [-]
Don’t forget you’uns or yinz!
I struggled with this when I was a school teacher. English lacks a good way to clarify you are addressing a group vs one person, which comes up a lot in a classroom. “Class, you…” is clunky, “You guys…” has obvious issues, and y’all or any other contraction is generally considered bad grammar. I generally went with y’all. Kids would laugh about it, but that seemed to help get their attention.
dfxm12 1 days ago [-]
Surely, you knew all of your students' names and if you were addressing one person, you could've used their name. Addressing the class as merely "class" seems adequate as well. I'm having a hard time thinking of a situation where you are forced to use "you" ambiguously.
madcaptenor 1 days ago [-]
What if you're addressing part of the class, though? Like "y'all in the back, you need to get back to your work".
dfxm12 1 days ago [-]
"You in the back" has the same level of specificity. Other options include (again) naming names or calling out a more specific location "You in the back row".
madcaptenor 1 days ago [-]
No, because "you in the back" could refer to just one person in the back, instead of several. So "y'all in the back" is more specific. (Of course names are an option in this context.)
dfxm12 1 days ago [-]
(Of course names are an option in this context.)
Yes, this is a case where you aren't forced to use "you" ambiguously in that context.
No, because "you in the back" could refer to just one person in the back, instead of several.
If you meant to address one person, you'd have said that one person's name, instead of voluntarily introducing ambiguity to the situation. Context & body language also makes this obvious. If you meant one person, you'd be making eye contact with one person instead of a group of people, etc. Students also know if they're paying attention or not. "The back" is not a specific area.
teddyh 1 days ago [-]
“Now, chat, settle down.”
AndrewKemendo 1 days ago [-]
That has to be more than 25 years
I grew up in Houston saying all that in the 80s
thechao 1 days ago [-]
Same here, frankly. I just didn't want to make an aggressive generalization that I couldn't support. I've got video of the usage from 2001.
pessimizer 1 days ago [-]
It's probably closer to 250 years than 25.
EvsCB 1 days ago [-]
Forms of it persists in regional dialects, its not super common anymore but in Yorkshire I still here "dees" and "thas", "yous" also persist as another form of the plural you.
autumnstwilight 20 hours ago [-]
Australia has "yous" which I think is a useful and sensible innovation!
gnabgib 19 hours ago [-]
That's not an Australia specific address + England, Scotland, Ireland, US (parts), Canada (parts), NZ, South Africa
If "wit" meant two people, I wondered if halfwit could be related. Turns out it isn't. "Wit" the pronoun and "wit" the noun referring to mental ability are unrelated homonyms, and halfwit comes from the latter.
nhgiang 1 days ago [-]
You two add
You two commit
You two push
u2git 1 days ago [-]
u2 add
u2 commit
u2 push
postepowanieadm 1 days ago [-]
Us3
alsetmusic 21 hours ago [-]
I had no idea that medieval folks worked in software development. I always thought they farmed. TIL.
/s I'm being silly, which is not entirely appropriate on this site. Maybe folks will let this one go because it's on point. If not, apologies.
xigoi 4 hours ago [-]
From what I can tell, good humor is usually appreciated on HN.
iterateoften 1 days ago [-]
Interesting that in English we had special pronoun for plurals of exactly 2, but in Russian for instance they have special case declensions for plurals less than 5.
Is that significant? I have no idea. Is there a language with special case for exactly 2 with another case for a “few” and with yet another for “a lot”? Interesting to compare different cultures.
kmm 24 hours ago [-]
Russian used to have dual pronouns too, but they all were lost somewhere in the 13th century, as in all other Slavic languages other than Slovenian.
The system used for small numbers is probably a broad extension of an earlier dual number for nouns, i.e. something like a plural but just for two things. For (some) male nouns, the nominative dual ending was the same as the genitive singular, which was then extended to all other nouns even when this correspondence didn't hold, and from just 2 things to 3 and 4 as well. Nowadays the dual has been completely forgotten for nouns, and the only interpretation of the rule is that it's a genitive singular.
stevula 1 days ago [-]
Whereas modern English only distinguishes grammatical number by singular/plural (and Old English had dual), some languages even have trial (three).
Russian distinguishes paucal (few) from plural (many). It’s not super common but there are some other languages that do it.
andrewshadura 1 days ago [-]
It’s not just 5, it’s also 21 to 25, 31 to 35 etc. However, some Slavic languages (e.g. Slovak and Czech) don’t do that, and only have those special numerals for under 5.
forbiddenvoid 18 hours ago [-]
We still have "both" and it's quite commonly used. It's even used _in_ the article, and in several comments here in this very discussion.
markus_zhang 1 days ago [-]
For anyone curious as me:
git means You two.
stoneman24 1 days ago [-]
I wonder how it evolved into the modern British slang of “git”. To quote Wikipedia [0]
“modern British English slang, a git (/ɡɪt/) is a term of insult used to describe someone—usually a man—who is considered stupid, incompetent, annoying, unpleasant, or silly.“.
And
“ Git is a popular open-source software for version control created by Linus Torvalds. Torvalds jokingly named it "git" after the slang term, later defining it as "the stupid content tracker".”
> Torvalds jokingly named it "git" after the slang term, later defining it as "the stupid content tracker".”
I think the better Torvalds quote was when he said "I name all my projects after myself"
talideon 1 days ago [-]
There appears to be nothing linking Old English "git" with Modern English "git". Also, OEng "git" would've been pronounced more like "yit".
OneLeggedCat 1 days ago [-]
I (an American) had only heard the slang version in Holy Grail, and didn't know the slang meaning, and finally am now seeing your comment. Now to lookup the meaning of "manky..."
vintermann 1 days ago [-]
"Listen baby, they're playing uncer song..."
"Git should get a room!"
rbonvall 1 days ago [-]
Of course. It's distributed.
dataflow 1 days ago [-]
Arabic has dual subject pronouns. I wonder if the concept developed independently or if there was any influence somehow?
malikolivier 22 hours ago [-]
It should be noted that only Modern Standard Arabic (the modern common Arabic language based on the language used in the Qur'an) still has dual.
Most (if not all?) spoken dialects, which evolved from this form of Arabic have already lost dual.
It's interesting that we notice a similar pattern of losing the dual in many languages. And it would be very interesting to find the opposite pattern: a language where the dual newly develops out of nowhere. However, I do not know of such language.
Another fun pronoun distinction I have seen is having two forms of "we" - one including the person you are talking to, and one excluding them.
(To clarify this was in Hokkien, not Anglo-Saxon).
FarmerPotato 23 hours ago [-]
One way to say this is "present company excluded" as when saying: culpability is general in the population, but not to accuse those you're speaking to.
HK-NC 5 hours ago [-]
Us lot?
postepowanieadm 1 days ago [-]
Like "us but not you"? That's mean.
kzrdude 1 days ago [-]
We already use this with "we", it's just not clear from the word if 'you' are included or not. Example: "We had eggs for breakfast".
shermantanktop 1 days ago [-]
Not when you’re delivering an insult to everyone present.
LAC-Tech 1 days ago [-]
Yeah it iw called the exclusive form lol.
But if you think about it seems normal... "we went to the city" is not really mean.
Rendered at 20:30:58 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Yes/No and Yea/Nay used to mean different things too: "Is this correct?" could be answered "Yea, it is correct" whereas "Is this not a mistake?" could be answered "Yes, it is correct" (which you can also parse by taking the 'not' literally).
"Courts martial" and "secretaries general" are examples where the original noun-first word order remains.
European Portuguese, like many (most?) Romance languages, has the informal/formal second person split. Brazilian Portuguese has dropped the informal second person (tu) and uses only the formal second person (você).
Now, because “thou” is archaic, it sounds overly stiff, and most English speakers assume it was the formal second person, but it was actually the informal form. So both Brazilian Portuguese and English underwent the same process and chose the same way.
Another fun thing is that calling someone you don't know "thou" used to be an intentional insult ("you're not worthy of being called 'you'"), something that might be missed by a modern reader of Shakespeare or other EME texts.
It's interesting that in Viennese German (my German is terrible but I do at least try) it seems like the informal form is the default, in a shop I get asked "Braucht du hilfe?" rather than the formal "Kann ich Ihnen helfen?".
Maybe this is what they mean when they say people in Vienna are rude, but coming from Scotland using informal language even in fairly serious settings just seems comfortable and normal.
My grandma used the formal address when reminiscing about going to the bakery when she was young but in the present she would use the familiar form and even the clerks would use a fake formal at best if they were feeling particularly grateful for having a job that day.
The origin for both is more "your lordship" ("domnia ta/voastră") than "your mercy", as well.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/16/opinion/sunday/pronouns-q...
Briefly, William Penn refused to take his hat off in the presence of King Charles, due to his Quaker beliefs in egalitarianism. This would have gotten him into very serious trouble for lèse-majesté, except that the king took his own hat off. "Friend Charles," said Penn (who had apparently never heard of the saying that when you're in a hole you should stop digging), "why dost thou not keep on thy hat?" And King Charles II replied, "'Tis the custom of this place that only one person should be covered at a time." Of course, normally it was the king who would keep his crown on. But after Charles said that, nobody in the court could bring a charge of lèse-majesté against William Penn for the incident.
For anyone not wanting to read through it all, the story in the conclusion of the chapter was a particularly good laugh:
> I have referred in a former chapter to the King's partiality for his dogs; one species of which is still celebrated among the fancy as King Charles's breed. On the occasion of an entry into Salisbury, an honest Cavalier pressed forward to see him, and came so near the coach that his Majesty cautioned the poor man not to cling too close to the door lest one of the little black spaniels in the coach should chance to bite him. The loyalist still persisting in being near, a spaniel seized him by the finger, and the sufferer cried with a loud voice, "God bless your Majesty, but G—d d—n your dogs!"
(1) https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/court-martial-res...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_and_no#The_Early_English_f...
Yes contradicts the negative question. So "Is this not a mistake?" should be contradicted with "yes, it is a mistake" or affirmed with "no, it is not a mistake".
It's further confusing because we have the idiom of suggesting things politely in a tentative manner such as isn't this a mistake? which has lost its sense of negativity and has come to mean "this is a mistake, I think," as opposed to being parsed literally to mean "this is not-a-mistake, I think".
From Wikipedia:
> English had a four-form system, comprising the words yea, nay, yes, and no. Yes contradicts a negatively formulated question, No affirms it; Yea affirms a positively formulated question, Nay contradicts it.
> Will they not go? — Yes, they will.
> Will they not go? — No, they will not.
> Will they go? — Yea, they will.
> Will they go? — Nay, they will not.
So, this has obviously simplified. But what I find interesting is that English speakers from the Philippines or from a Russian background chose differently (where SME is standard modern English, and PRE is Philippine/"Russian" English):
Will they not go? — SME: Yes, they will. PRE: No, they will. [Not sure about that one.]
Will they not go? — SME: No, they will not. PRE: Yes, they will not. [I hear this all the time from non-native English speakers.]
Will they go? — SME/PRE: Yes, they will.
Will they go? — SME/PRE: No, they will not.
ETA from Wikipedia :-)
> In December 1993, a witness in a court in Stirlingshire, Scotland, answered "aye" to confirm he was the person summoned, but was told by a sheriff judge that he must answer either yes or no, or else be held in contempt of court. When asked if he understood, he replied "aye" again, and was imprisoned for 90 minutes for contempt of court. On his release he said, "I genuinely thought I was answering him."
Modern "Are you happy now?" is said with sarcastic tone, to spoil happiness. Would be archaically "Are you not happy?" As if to dare contradiction. It's loaded, unlike when saying sympathetically "Are you unhappy?"
Others:
"Are you not entertained?" "Are you not the very same Smith that dwelt at Haversham?" "Prick me, do I not bleed?"
But commonly: "Are you not a Christian?" most likely seems direct, but said in a formal sense, "rhetorically", an exhortation to act like one.
“They” and “their” for my whole lifetime were plurals. Now we’ve pretty much lost the mere clarity of knowing if the pronoun means 1 person or more than 1 person. Was watching “Adolescence” and the police mentioned “they” in regards to the victim of a crime. I was mistakenly under the impression that there weee multiple victims for much of the episode.
I’m very clearly slow to adapt to the new definitions.
I find myself wrong all the time, and I'm glad for the lesson!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_(pronoun)
So maybe we should bring back it, or ignore Chaucer as an authority.
Even people who complain about the singular "they" use it when they're not paying attention. It's a regular part of the English language.
If it's something we're all accustomed to and comfortable with, why even mention that it was being used in the distant past? The article is trying to simultaneously argue "try this new term they, it's easy, everybody's saying it now, it's modern, you'll love it" and "this term is not at all strange and new, you're silly if you feel uncomfortable with it because it has always been used." It's trying to have it both ways in its wrangling.
Do people also casually use it to refer to humans, or is it just me?
The reason why there's any debate at all about the singular they is not because it's new and strange. It's because beginning in the mid-18th century, influential grammar textbooks started discouraging its use and advocating "he" in its place. Many generations of kids have grown up being told in school that the singular "they" is wrong, but despite that, it has remained a very standard part of spoken English.
OK, but they were influential, so they influenced the 1850s and subsequent decades, making this usage currently new and strange, because for a century or more people used he instead. Why deny that? To persuade them with the implication "we never got accustomed to saying he, turns out you didn't ever speak this way, it was just an illusion"?
I'm not sure what matters in persuading people to speak differently, but saying that a term is being revived, rather than being a complete neologism, is ... admittedly a little bit persuasive, but it doesn't much help with the glaring issue that it's still a major change from what we're used to: and there are additional valid complaints, firstly that it removes information, and secondly that it's used less sparingly than it was in the past. It's now commonly written, in formal texts where clarity matters.
Ha, I see there was an 1850 act of parliament: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretation_Act_1850
This was for clarity in the phrasing of legislation.
I've picked up a rumor that this 1652 book encouraged the use of he in gender neutral contexts: https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1641-170... but I can't find where. It might just be an exaggeration based on the part where it says "The Maſculine is more worthy than the Feminine, and the Feminine is more worthy than the Neuter." But there's no doubt that the 17th century, never mind the 19th, was stuffed with sexist bastards in influential positions. So what's the use in pointing at the past, or even at the present, to say that some of the time they used they? Fundamentally you still have to argue for why, or why not.
"oh, what did they say?"
---
"the wait staff messed up my order"
"how did they do that?"
No, usage makes correctness in language, not people trying to invent some weird conlang they wrongly insist is correct English.
All my English teachers from Grades 1-12.
Using "they" as a singular pronoun would bring out the red pen.
It did made me go through many topics, like dual, exclusive/inclusive group person.
Still in a corner of my head, there is the idea to introduce some more pronouns to handle more subtilty about which first person we are expressing about[2]. The ego is not the present attention, nor they are that thing intertwined with the rest of the world without which nothing exists.
[1] https://fr.wikiversity.org/wiki/Recherche:Sur_l%E2%80%99exte...
[2] The project does provide an homogenized extended set of pronouns with 6 more than the two regular ones found in any primary school book. And completing all cases for all nouns is the biggest chunk that need to be completed, though it’s already done by now for the most frequent paradigms.
Somehow that just doesn't land the same.
I fear that a modern colloquial rendering would disappoint yet further:
"Our secret song"
"Our shared song" is looser, though context helps.
"They're playing our song" still captures the timeless feeling. But is wrong for the poem.
I’m surprised how much I’m enjoying it. And I can’t believe I have 195 episodes left.
Same number of syllables.
Maybe “Song of just us two”
Like it’s common to hear “You two better stay out of trouble”
Or “it was us two in the apartment alone…”
Or “them two are pretty good together ”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6-QagSE7sFY
"n̥-s-ero-" is sort of < "not" next-is-plural "mine" >.
So, plural-(invert mine). Or roughly close to "we".
"n̥-h-ero-" is sort of < "not" next-is-inclusive-plural "mine" >.
So, plural-(group (invert mine)). Or roughly close to "us".
But both are pretty close to the same meaning. High German maintained a lot of PIE, and is very close in a lot of ways. Though... Welsh is closer.
"From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic", Ringe.
And the simpler "Lexikon der indogermanischen Partikeln und Pronominalstämme", Dunkel.
Both use "n̥-s-ero-", though in the more traditional /ˈun.se.rɑz/ form.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingvaeonic_nasal_spirant_law
Edit: Check out the Proto-Germanic personal pronouns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Proto-Germanic_person...
I have no idea how to say that idiomatically in German, but it struck me that those are both “true” friends.
"W'all" would be nice to have. I guess it's not a thing because it sounds too much like the things that separate rooms.
I do prefer "y'all", though. I think it's the best one we've got, of the options ("yous" being another big one, and ew, gross)
I also love the nuance of "y'all" and "all y'all".
That's something those western southerners told me. I don't know if a linguist would agree, but that seems to be the understanding of some actual language users...
All I know is that there is a second boundary somewhere through TX, NM, and AZ, because I've never met a native Californian who would say "y'all" non ironically.
When southern people say y'all to one person, they're really addressing you and your family (even though you might be the only one there.) If I ask "how y'all doing?" I want to know how you and yours are doing.
I just want people to stop asking me how I'm doing if they don't care.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that "How's it going" is a greeting, not an interrogative, and I want that change undone forever.
I just use "Howdy".
Another 100+ years, and this'll be some solid grammar.
I struggled with this when I was a school teacher. English lacks a good way to clarify you are addressing a group vs one person, which comes up a lot in a classroom. “Class, you…” is clunky, “You guys…” has obvious issues, and y’all or any other contraction is generally considered bad grammar. I generally went with y’all. Kids would laugh about it, but that seemed to help get their attention.
Yes, this is a case where you aren't forced to use "you" ambiguously in that context.
No, because "you in the back" could refer to just one person in the back, instead of several.
If you meant to address one person, you'd have said that one person's name, instead of voluntarily introducing ambiguity to the situation. Context & body language also makes this obvious. If you meant one person, you'd be making eye contact with one person instead of a group of people, etc. Students also know if they're paying attention or not. "The back" is not a specific area.
I grew up in Houston saying all that in the 80s
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yous
You two commit
You two push
/s I'm being silly, which is not entirely appropriate on this site. Maybe folks will let this one go because it's on point. If not, apologies.
Is that significant? I have no idea. Is there a language with special case for exactly 2 with another case for a “few” and with yet another for “a lot”? Interesting to compare different cultures.
The system used for small numbers is probably a broad extension of an earlier dual number for nouns, i.e. something like a plural but just for two things. For (some) male nouns, the nominative dual ending was the same as the genitive singular, which was then extended to all other nouns even when this correspondence didn't hold, and from just 2 things to 3 and 4 as well. Nowadays the dual has been completely forgotten for nouns, and the only interpretation of the rule is that it's a genitive singular.
Russian distinguishes paucal (few) from plural (many). It’s not super common but there are some other languages that do it.
git means You two.
“modern British English slang, a git (/ɡɪt/) is a term of insult used to describe someone—usually a man—who is considered stupid, incompetent, annoying, unpleasant, or silly.“.
And “ Git is a popular open-source software for version control created by Linus Torvalds. Torvalds jokingly named it "git" after the slang term, later defining it as "the stupid content tracker".”
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(slang)
I think the better Torvalds quote was when he said "I name all my projects after myself"
"Git should get a room!"
It's interesting that we notice a similar pattern of losing the dual in many languages. And it would be very interesting to find the opposite pattern: a language where the dual newly develops out of nowhere. However, I do not know of such language.
So you'd expect to see languages from western Europe to south Asia that either have the dual concept, or have an attested ancestor that did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroasiatic_languages
Interestingly, to say one-handed you'd say "leath-lámh", where _leath_ means half, so half the <thing that's usually one of a pair>.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(slang)
(To clarify this was in Hokkien, not Anglo-Saxon).
But if you think about it seems normal... "we went to the city" is not really mean.