7 ms·

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 sur

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.

LAC-Tech 7mo 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.
triage8004 7mo ago
This sucks because yes its a mistake or no its not a mistake both fit
- adammarples 7mo 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.
  - card_zero 7mo ago
    It'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".
    - FarmerPotato 7mo 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.
    - FabHK 6mo 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."
stevula 7mo 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?
- doobiedowner 7mo ago
  Whoppers junior
- brandonhorst 7mo ago
  AirPods Pro :)
- FarmerPotato 7mo ago
  Light fantastic
- drewstiff 7mo ago
  Hards on
- zoky 7mo ago
  Passersby
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
- gerdesj 7mo 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)! (1) https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/court-martial-results-from-the-military-court-centres https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/court-martial-res...
pdpi 7mo 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.
- andrepd 7mo 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 7mo ago
    Similarly, Spanish "vuestra merced" evolved to "usted".
    - zoky 7mo 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 7mo 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.
matt-attack 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
    Leaning on Chaucer isn't sufficient, because it was once a pronoun used for people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_(pronoun) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_(pronoun) So maybe we should bring back it, or ignore Chaucer as an authority.
    - Hasnep 7mo 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 7mo ago
        I get what you’re saying, but Chaucer was not in _my_ lifetime.
    - DiogenesKynikos 7mo 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.
lemoncucumber 7mo 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). https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/16/opinion/sunday/pronouns-quakers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/16/opinion/sunday/pronouns-q...
- rmunn 7mo ago
  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/Chapter_5 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 6mo 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!"

LAC-Tech 7mo 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.

triage8004 7mo ago

This sucks because yes its a mistake or no its not a mistake both fit

adammarples 7mo 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.
- card_zero 7mo ago
  It'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".
  - FarmerPotato 7mo 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.
  - FabHK 6mo 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."

stevula 7mo 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?

doobiedowner 7mo ago
Whoppers junior
brandonhorst 7mo ago
AirPods Pro :)
FarmerPotato 7mo ago
Light fantastic
drewstiff 7mo ago
Hards on
zoky 7mo ago
Passersby
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
gerdesj 7mo 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)! (1) https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/court-martial-results-from-the-military-court-centres https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/court-martial-res...

pdpi 7mo 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.

andrepd 7mo 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 7mo ago
  Similarly, Spanish "vuestra merced" evolved to "usted".
  - zoky 7mo 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 7mo 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.

matt-attack 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
  Leaning on Chaucer isn't sufficient, because it was once a pronoun used for people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_(pronoun) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_(pronoun) So maybe we should bring back it, or ignore Chaucer as an authority.
  - Hasnep 7mo 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 7mo ago
      I get what you’re saying, but Chaucer was not in _my_ lifetime.
  - DiogenesKynikos 7mo 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.

lemoncucumber 7mo 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). https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/16/opinion/sunday/pronouns-quakers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/16/opinion/sunday/pronouns-q...

rmunn 7mo ago
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/Chapter_5 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 6mo 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!"