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Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy
- markus_zhang 6mo agoFor anyone curious as me: git means You two.
- stoneman24 6mo agoI 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(slang)
- talideon 6mo agoThere appears to be nothing linking Old English "git" with Modern English "git". Also, OEng "git" would've been pronounced more like "yit".
- Octoth0rpe 6mo ago> 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"
- OneLeggedCat 6mo agoI (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 6mo ago"Listen baby, they're playing uncer song..." "Git should get a room!"
- rbonvall 6mo agoOf course. It's distributed.
- frogulis 6mo agoBoy 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 6mo agon̥ 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.
- z500 6mo agoI've never heard of it being based on that root before. Do you have a source?
- shakna 6mo agoThe 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 6mo agoOh I've actually been meaning to get around to reading that first one. I'll have to crack that open.
- zahlman 6mo agoI feel like nasal sounds being associated with negation must be even older than PIE.
- nhgiang 6mo agoYou two add You two commit You two push
- u2git 6mo agou2 add u2 commit u2 push
- postepowanieadm 6mo agoUs3
- huijzer 6mo agoAlso 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 6mo agoW'all have got y'all for plural you.
- thechao 6mo agoYou, 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 6mo agoDon’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 6mo agoSurely, 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 6mo agoWhat if you're addressing part of the class, though? Like "y'all in the back, you need to get back to your work".
- eigenspace 6mo agoI 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 6mo ago> Somehow that just doesn't land the same. I fear that a modern colloquial rendering would disappoint yet further: our besties tune
- FarmerPotato 6mo agoCertes, 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 6mo agoIf 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.
- LAC-Tech 6mo agoIf you are interested in Wulf and Eadwacer it is beautifully sung here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6-QagSE7sFY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6-QagSE7sFY
- iterateoften 6mo agoWe 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 ”
- dghf 6mo agoThe Wannadies had to go with "You & Me Song" https://youtu.be/t_e_45Szprk?si=4JVZHZzguqm3SFHN https://youtu.be/t_e_45Szprk?si=4JVZHZzguqm3SFHN
- psychoslave 6mo agoMy 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%99extension_des_genres_grammaticaux_en_fran%C3%A7ais 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.
- LAC-Tech 6mo agoAnother 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).
- postepowanieadm 6mo agoLike "us but not you"? That's mean.
- LAC-Tech 6mo agoYeah it iw called the exclusive form lol. But if you think about it seems normal... "we went to the city" is not really mean.
- shermantanktop 6mo agoNot when you’re delivering an insult to everyone present.
- kzrdude 6mo agoWe 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".
- FarmerPotato 6mo agoOne 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 6mo agoUs lot?
- mohsen1 6mo agoIf you're interested in history of English, I'd highly recommend the History of English podcast. https://historyofenglishpodcast.com https://historyofenglishpodcast.com
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- red_admiral 6mo agoEnglish 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.
- LAC-Tech 6mo agoIt's worth noting that early on in English, þu/ģe (thou/ye) did not say anything about formality. It was just singular and plural.
- triage8004 6mo agoThis sucks because yes its a mistake or no its not a mistake both fit
- adammarples 6mo agothey 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.
- card_zero 6mo agoIt's confusing because it was stated wrongly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_and_no#The_Early_English_four-form_system 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".
- dataflow 6mo agoArabic has dual subject pronouns. I wonder if the concept developed independently or if there was any influence somehow?
- Two9A 6mo agoArabic is on the Semitic branch of the hypothesised proto-Indo-European language, which has dual number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_(grammatical_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.
- eigenspace 6mo agoThe 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/Semitic_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroasiatic_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroasiatic_languages
- kevin_thibedeau 6mo agoPersian is PIE and had influence over semitic languages in cultural contact. The connection could be there.
- z500 6mo agoEgyptian had it, and although it's Afroasiatic it's not Semitic, so it must have gone back further than that.
- mathieuh 6mo agoSemitic languages are Afroasiatic, not Indoeuropean.
- another-dave 6mo agoWithin 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>.
- shrubby 6mo agoyoutwo commit -m "Refactoring translations"
- pimlottc 6mo agoPair programming are wit?
- iterateoften 6mo agoInteresting 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.
- andrewshadura 6mo agoIt’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.
- stevula 6mo agoWhereas 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.
- kmm 6mo agoRussian 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.
- trinix912 6mo agoSlovene 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 6mo agoThere are still some remnants of this in Serbian and Croatian, e.g. the semi-dual "nas dvoje / nas dva".
- alsetmusic 6mo agoI 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 6mo agoFrom what I can tell, good humor is usually appreciated on HN.
- tzs 6mo agoIf "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.
- forbiddenvoid 6mo agoWe 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.
- benj111 6mo agoFor anyone wondering git in this context is related to the modern form, although does seem to have its own stories behind it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(slang) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(slang)