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Exactly. There's loads of examples of such shifts in other languages, for example in Portuguese the formal you is conjugated in grammatical third person despite
by andrepd 5y ago
Exactly. There's loads of examples of such shifts in other languages, for example in Portuguese the formal you is conjugated in grammatical third person despite being semantically second person, arising from people being formally addressed in the third person ("Does the Right Honourable gentleman agree that...").
- umanwizard 5y agoSame is true in Spanish, where "usted" ultimately derives from "vuestra merced". For a completely different example, "on" in formal French means something like "one" in English: a pronoun for a general, unspecified person; as such, it takes singular conjugations. However, in colloquial speech, it means "we" and has almost completely replaced "nous" as a subject pronoun. Thus: "il est" (he is); "on est" (we are, colloquial language); "nous sommes" (we are, standard language)