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tomato
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: I get so little foreign language experience, I must be in Koreatown, Los Angeles.
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 Posted: Sun Jan 14, 2007 12:27 pm Post subject: |
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| SPINOZA wrote: |
| I also hate verbs with multiple meanings, like 'to take' |
'to run' is supposed to hold the record on that score. |
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Leslie Cheswyck
Joined: 31 May 2003
Location: University of Western Chile
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| Posted: Mon Jan 15, 2007 1:38 am Post subject: |
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| RACETRAITOR wrote: |
| The one thing that bothers me about English is there is no plural pronoun for "you." |
There is: You
Up until about the 18th Century or so, the second person singular subject pronoun commonly used was thou. The second person plural subject pronoun You was used when addressing higher ups and strangers. I guess sometime around Cromwell's day the feeling in the land was that everybody was entitled to respect, meaning that the demeaning thou had to go. Mith would know for sure.
Pity, we must rely on stereotyped Italo-American gangsters from the Bronx and/or inbred hillbilly yokels from Appalachia to sort this out for us. i.e. Yous/Y'all |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Mon Jan 15, 2007 1:47 am Post subject: |
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| Leslie Cheswyck wrote: |
| RACETRAITOR wrote: |
| The one thing that bothers me about English is there is no plural pronoun for "you." |
There is: You
Up until about the 18th Century or so, the second person singular subject pronoun commonly used was thou. The second person plural subject pronoun You was used when addressing higher ups and strangers. I guess sometime around Cromwell's day the feeling in the land was that everybody was entitled to respect, meaning that the demeaning thou had to go. Mith would know for sure.
Pity, we must rely on stereotyped Italo-American gangsters from the Bronx and/or inbred hillbilly yokels from Appalachia to sort this out for us. i.e. Yous/Y'all |
And where I come from (the North of England) we still use thee/thy/tha. |
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Woland
Joined: 10 May 2006
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Mon Jan 15, 2007 4:34 am Post subject: |
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'Get' is probably the verb in English with the widest semantic range, but I can't provide any conclusinve evidence of that.
'You' is historically the second person plural accusative (direct object) form. 'Ye' is the nominative (subject) form. The spread of 'you' both to plural subject and to singular forms long predates Cromwell. You can see it happening in works written around Shakespeare's day. I wrote an early undergrad sociolinguistics paper on this, looking at the plays of Marlowe. The change probably didn't have any immediate social cause but reflected a general trend in English towards loss of explicit case marking.
EDIT: Fixed really bad error.
Last edited by Woland on Mon Jan 15, 2007 6:15 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Bronski
Joined: 17 Apr 2006
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| Posted: Mon Jan 15, 2007 4:36 am Post subject: |
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| Language is always changing and the more one aspect is simplified the more complex another becomes. I do agree, however, that there is too much emphasis on prescriptive grammar. There's no logical reason I shouldn't be able to end a sentence with a preposition, for example. |
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kermo
Joined: 01 Sep 2004
Location: Eating eggs, with a comb, out of a shoe.
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| Posted: Mon Jan 15, 2007 3:19 pm Post subject: |
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| Big_Bird wrote: |
| Leslie Cheswyck wrote: |
| RACETRAITOR wrote: |
| The one thing that bothers me about English is there is no plural pronoun for "you." |
There is: You
Up until about the 18th Century or so, the second person singular subject pronoun commonly used was thou. The second person plural subject pronoun You was used when addressing higher ups and strangers. I guess sometime around Cromwell's day the feeling in the land was that everybody was entitled to respect, meaning that the demeaning thou had to go. Mith would know for sure.
Pity, we must rely on stereotyped Italo-American gangsters from the Bronx and/or inbred hillbilly yokels from Appalachia to sort this out for us. i.e. Yous/Y'all |
And where I come from (the North of England) we still use thee/thy/tha. |
Big Bird, you're a Northerner? I like you more and more all the time. Can you give me an example of how to use "tha"?
Eamo, don't you have a good story about your Irish mum and her creative detour around this hole in the English language?
As I recall, it went like this:
Singular: You
A few people: Yous
(can't remember this one): Youzens
Possessive of a large number of people: Youzenzes |
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kermo
Joined: 01 Sep 2004
Location: Eating eggs, with a comb, out of a shoe.
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| Posted: Mon Jan 15, 2007 3:20 pm Post subject: |
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| There is one rule in the English language that is generally ignored because it's hard to cope with. I have just broken it. Can you guess what it is? |
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Bondrock
Joined: 08 Oct 2006
Location: ^_^
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| Posted: Mon Jan 15, 2007 7:35 pm Post subject: |
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a preposition is a poor thing to end a sentence with.
but i use the term 'guidelines' instead of rules... 'rules' makes grammar sound inflexible. |
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jinks
Joined: 27 Oct 2004
Location: Formerly: Lower North Island
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| Posted: Mon Jan 15, 2007 10:09 pm Post subject: |
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As Winston Churchill is said to have said:
Ending a sentence with a preposition is something I will not up with put! |
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kermo
Joined: 01 Sep 2004
Location: Eating eggs, with a comb, out of a shoe.
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| Posted: Mon Jan 15, 2007 10:30 pm Post subject: |
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| jinks wrote: |
As Winston Churchill is said to have said:
Ending a sentence with a preposition is something I will not up with put! |
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/churchill.html
That's not quite right, but then again, nobody is quite sure what the original saying was, if it was ever said at all. |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Mon Jan 15, 2007 11:48 pm Post subject: |
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| kermo wrote: |
| Big_Bird wrote: |
| Leslie Cheswyck wrote: |
| RACETRAITOR wrote: |
The one thing that bothers me about English is there is no plural pronoun for "you." |
There is: You
Up until about the 18th Century or so, the second person singular subject pronoun commonly used was thou. The second person plural subject pronoun You was used when addressing higher ups and strangers. I guess sometime around Cromwell's day the feeling in the land was that everybody was entitled to respect, meaning that the demeaning thou had to go. Mith would know for sure.
Pity, we must rely on stereotyped Italo-American gangsters from the Bronx and/or inbred hillbilly yokels from Appalachia to sort this out for us. i.e. Yous/Y'all |
And where I come from (the North of England) we still use thee/thy/tha. |
Big Bird, you're a Northerner? I like you more and more all the time. Can you give me an example of how to use "tha"? |
Cheers to you Kermo! 
"tha" is the subject pronoun, so you might say "Tha's a southern softy shandy sipping shite!"
"Thee" is the object pronoun, so you have:
A: "What's tha got the-er then?"
B: "Nought for thee, bugger off!"
And thinking about "thy" - it's actually pronounced more like "tha" where I come from. So one might hear: "Tha'll get a bloomin' smack in tha bloody face if tha dunt gi' o'er!"
Last edited by Big_Bird on Tue Jan 16, 2007 6:00 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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Privateer
Joined: 31 Aug 2005
Location: Easy Street.
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| Posted: Tue Jan 16, 2007 9:07 am Post subject: |
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| Woland wrote: |
| 'You' is historically the second person plural accusative (direct object) form. 'Ye' is the nominative (subject) form. |
I read somewhere once that 'ye' was originally just the way they wrote 'the' - either as a shorthand way of spelling it or because 'y' represented the 'th' sound. Then later people mistook it for a whole different word using the 'y' sound.
Is none of that true then? |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Tue Jan 16, 2007 6:10 pm Post subject: |
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| kermo wrote: |
Big Bird, you're a Northerner? I like you more and more all the time. Can you give me an example of how to use "tha"?
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tha is the modern Yorkshire equivalent of thou.
I just had a google about it and found this (the blue highlights are mine): Thou
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Current usage
You is now the standard English second-person pronoun, and encompasses both the singular and plural senses. In some dialects, however, "thou" has persisted, and in others the vacuum created by the loss of a distinction has led to the creation of new forms of the second-person plural. The forms vary across the English-speaking world.
British Isles
Persistence of second-person singular
In Modern English in some parts of northern England, tha is still used as a familiar pronoun in everyday speech. In particular throughout rural Yorkshire, the old distinction between Nominative and Objective is preserved. The possessive is often written as thy in local dialect writings, but is pronounced as an unstressed tha, and the Possessive form of tha has in modern usage almost exclusively followed other English dialects in becoming yours or the local word your�n (from your one):
Nominative Objective Genitive Possessive
2nd Person singular tha thee thy (tha) yours / your'n
The apparent incongruity between the archaic nominative, objective and genitive forms of this pronoun on the one hand and the modern possessive form on the other may be a signal that the linguistic drift of Yorkshire dialect is causing tha to fall into disuse; however, a measure of local pride in the dialect may be counteracting this.
Thoo has also been used in the Orcadian Scots dialect in place of the singular informal thou.
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