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.
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?
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.
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...").
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".
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.
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!
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
"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".
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".”
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.
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?
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.
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...").
Similarly, Spanish "vuestra merced" evolved to "usted".
This sucks because yes its a mistake or no its not a mistake both fit
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.
It's confusing because it was stated wrongly.
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".
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.
Most proponents of "they" have split personalities, so let them indulge in whatever float their boats.
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!
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.
[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.
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.
> Somehow that just doesn't land the same.
I fear that a modern colloquial rendering would disappoint yet further:
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”
Or “it was us two in the apartment alone…”
Or “them two are pretty good together ”
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.
The Wannadies had to go with "You & Me Song" https://youtu.be/t_e_45Szprk?si=4JVZHZzguqm3SFHN
If you are interested in Wulf and Eadwacer it is beautifully sung here:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6-QagSE7sFY
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.
There are still some remnants of this in Serbian and Croatian, e.g. the semi-dual "nas dvoje / nas dva".
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.
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.
I've never heard of it being based on that root before. Do you have a source?
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Proto-Germanic_person...
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.
Same with Ic - Ich
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
W'all have got y'all for plural you.
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.
"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".
Have you yet progressed to y'all being singular and all y'all being plural?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I refuse out of principle, but agree, that works.
I just use "Howdy".
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
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.
meanwhile, my New Jersey-born boss uses "you guys" despite herself being female and having lived in the South longer than I have
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.
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.
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.
What if you're addressing part of the class, though? Like "y'all in the back, you need to get back to your work".
"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".
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.)
(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.
“Now, chat, settle down.”
That has to be more than 25 years
I grew up in Houston saying all that in the 80s
It's probably closer to 250 years than 25.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You two add
You two commit
You two push
u2 add u2 commit u2 push
Us3
Arabic has dual subject pronouns. I wonder if the concept developed independently or if there was any influence somehow?
Arabic is on the Semitic branch of the hypothesised proto-Indo-European language, which has dual number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_(grammatical_number)
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.
The Semitic language family is not part of the proto-indo-european language family. It's from the Afroasiatic family
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroasiatic_languages
Persian is PIE and had influence over semitic languages in cultural contact. The connection could be there.
Within Indo-European languages, Irish has the concept of the dual. It's used with things that come in pairs like "mo dhá láimh" - my two hands.
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>.
Semitic languages are Afroasiatic, not Indoeuropean.
For anyone curious as me:
git means You two.
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".”
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(slang)
> 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"
There appears to be nothing linking Old English "git" with Modern English "git". Also, OEng "git" would've been pronounced more like "yit".
"Listen baby, they're playing uncer song..."
"Git should get a room!"
Of course. It's distributed.
If you're interested in history of English, I'd highly recommend the History of English podcast. https://historyofenglishpodcast.com
youtwo commit -m "Refactoring translations"
Pair programming are wit?
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).
Like "us but not you"? That's mean.
Not when you’re delivering an insult to everyone present.
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.