"Decay" in aspects of English grammar

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birdeen's call

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"You guys" seems to be very popular throughout the US.
 

Frank Antonson

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Yes. That's what I call a periphrastic solution to the problem.

It doesn't really serve in formal speech or writing though. "All of you" can solve the problem better -- also periphrastic,
 

MrPedantic

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In my opinion there is no problem labeling a linguistic development decay if it has resulted in a clear loss to the language, as is the case with the 2. person pronoun.

Would you say then that the 2 sing. in English (in, say, Shakespeare's day) expressed something that it is no longer possible for English to express?

If so, what would that something be?

Best wishes,

MrP
 

NikkiBarber

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Would you say then that the 2 sing. in English (in, say, Shakespeare's day) expressed something that it is no longer possible for English to express?

If so, what would that something be?

Best wishes,

MrP
I don't think that it is impossible to express the meaning of the old 1. person singular by other means, but I do think that the alternatives are a lot less simple and often less elegant.
Thou/thee served a function. The pronouns alone made it clear that they were referring to only one person. In modern English you will need additional context to make your meaning understood. If the separate form for the 1. person singular had been preserved it would be unnecessary to use more complicated structures to specify the number of people you are addressing. Personally, I consider that a loss.
 

Frank Antonson

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I am not sure that the distinction between Shakespeare's use of "you" vs "thou" is completely understood. I looked into it once and did not find a satisfactory answer. I believe that it might have been in flux at the time.
For my part I am SURE that there has been a loss in English with what has happened to the second person pronouns.
 

5jj

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Frank Antonson

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Thanks!

That is the best explanation that I have read.

I would be interested to hear about how the Quakers of Pennsylvania preserved what Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his poem"Evangeline" referred to as "the thou and the thee of the Quakers".

Incidentally, I still feel that it was an instance of "decay" when it is compared to the grammatical nuances available in French and
 

Frank Antonson

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and German. It's like...we English speakers had our chance but lost it.

(I can't type on a laptop!!)
 

5jj

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Incidentally, I still feel that it was an instance of "decay" when it is compared to the grammatical nuances available in French and German. It's like...we English speakers had our chance but lost it.
I am inclined to agree with you in the case of 'thou'. In general however, I am unhappy with the use of the word 'decay'. It suggests a deterioration in the language, which some of us do not feel. I now regret saying, in an earlier post, "I think that the subjunctive is 'decaying' in BrE" I should have said, "...is disappearing".

For the past five hundred years or so there have been people who have lamented the decline in our language, but, as Mr P wisely said (of a different form): "Hence the absurdity of supposing that early to mid 20th-century linguistic habits are in some sense particularly worthy of conservation".
 

MrPedantic

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Thou/thee served a function. The pronouns alone made it clear that they were referring to only one person. In modern English you will need additional context to make your meaning understood. If the separate form for the 1. person singular had been preserved it would be unnecessary to use more complicated structures to specify the number of people you are addressing. Personally, I consider that a loss.

That's interesting. I know that I've sometimes caused (or suffered) momentary confusion as a result of "you = 2nd person" vs "you = one", but I don't think I've found number problematic.

On the other hand, the difficulty of translation into English from a language which observes the distinction might suggest that not every nuance can be expressed in other ways.

For instance, in this passage from Tolstoy's Family Happiness (translator not identified in the e-text from which I copied it), the thou-ing gives an otherwise simple scene a bizarrely mannered and awkward effect (somewhere between the liturgy and D.H. Lawrence's gamekeeper) which must be quite remote from what the author intended:

"I want you to say 'thou' to me," I said. [Говорите мне "ты", - сказала я.]
"I was just going to," he answered; "I feel for the first time that thou art entirely mine;" and his calm happy gaze that drew me to him rested on me.
...
I too wished to say "thou" to him, but I felt ashamed.
"Why dost thou walk so fast?" I said quickly and almost in a whisper; I could not help blushing.

But does that indicate a "loss", necessarily?

MrP
 

Frank Antonson

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I think so.

The loss is hard to accept if one has never had the option of using what has been lost.

The shift in German from using "Sie" to using "du" is a social step to take. I can imagine how one might blush if that person thought that the shift had been taken too soon.
 

MrPedantic

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Suppose then that the distinction was indeed serviceable. Under what circumstances might the English nonetheless have discarded it?

It seems strange, for instance, that a linguistic feature that could very efficiently express social inferiority / superiority should have begun to disappear at a time (the 17th century) when traditional hierarchies were still well established.

Or was it that the consolidated "you" was even more serviceable than the distinction, and provided a net gain?

MrP
 

Frank Antonson

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WHY that happened is quite another question.

I think that some of the earlier "decay" (in, say, case endings and gender) occurred because of the collision of Old Norse and Anglo Saxon prior to 1066.

Frankly, I have never thought very hard about the WHY. I have such thought about the loss (something that I would not have appreciated had I not learned to speak languages which retain the distinctions within their pronoun systems).

Do you have any possible explanation of WHY?
 

Frank Antonson

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Oh, also, I don't think the distinction that I understand is as much one of superior/inferior as it is strange/familiar. There is a matter of intimacy.
 

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Oh, also, I don't think the distinction that I understand is as much one of superior/inferior as it is strange/familiar. There is a matter of intimacy.

I agree. In Danish I would address anyone not previously known to me (except for young children) with the 2. person plural pronoun. It wouldn't matter if I was talking to a homeless person or the Queen.

Historically I'd be very interested to know why the distinction disappeared from the English language when it did, but I couldn't even begin to guess.
 

NikkiBarber

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That's interesting. I know that I've sometimes caused (or suffered) momentary confusion as a result of "you = 2nd person" vs "you = one", but I don't think I've found number problematic.

MrP

Of course using "you" only as a plural pronoun wouldn't help you single out four people in a group of six, but at least it distinguishes individuals from groups. Haven't you ever found yourself speaking to one person among several others and been understood as if you were addressing them all? Or vice versa? It might be a minor point, but since I consider the ability to make that distinction useful, I see the inability to do so as a loss.

"You=one" is another problem for me. In my first language we have another word for "you" when it means "one." I don't know if there ever was a distinction in English, but if there was then I would consider its disappearance to be a loss as well.

Maybe I am taking a pessimistic view of this, and I don't consider all developments in a language as losses, but some changes either aren't practical or are made for reasons that don't make sense. When the definition of a word is suddenly replaced with its former antonym simply because a lot of people used it wrong it is bound to cause confusion. I am not aware that this has happened recently to any English words, but it has happened to several in Danish and a change like that is another thing that I would label as decay.
 
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Frank Antonson

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I am more able to accept sudden changes in a word's definition than changes in grammatical structure.

Fairly recently in Black English the word "bad" has taken on the meaning of "good". A word like "nice" through the years has been all over the place in its meaning.

Slang is fine with me.
 

MrPedantic

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Do you have any possible explanation of WHY?

I wonder myself whether the question is more circular than it seems. In effect, we are asking why "thou" disappeared from standard modern English; but it might be said that "thou" never had a place in standard modern English in any case, except in its religious and poetic uses.

Or to put it another way, perhaps "thou" had its place in various forms of English as a working 2nd sing. till (say) the end of the 17th/beginning of the 18th centuries, at which point standard English began to establish itself. The latter continued to develop thou-lessly, while "thou" persisted in e.g. dialect forms (it can still be heard in some parts of the north of England).

That seems to leave us with the question of why standard English had no real use for "thou"; but perhaps the kind of distinction "thou" represents was redundant, in the kinds of situation where standard English might be used.

MrP
 

MrPedantic

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Haven't you ever found yourself speaking to one person among several others and been understood as if you were addressing them all? Or vice versa? It might be a minor point, but since I consider the ability to make that distinction useful, I see the inability to do so as a loss.
I admit, I have no recollection of problems of this kind. That might simply be an error of memory; but on the other hand, I do remember that sometimes the "you/one" ambiguity has caused momentary confusions. If I remember the latter, I would have expected to remember the former, had they ever occurred.

MrP
 

5jj

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Mr P's last post raised a few questions that I can't begin to answer. My own feeling (and I stress the word) is that we have lost something in the disappearance of 'thou' rather similar to the loss we have in the replacement of 'Mr/Mrs/Miss X' by first names.

When I worked in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, the ritual(s) of moving from the equivalent of 'you' to that of 'thou', and from the equivalent of 'Mr X' to 'Jed' were important. When I returned to England in 1975, I missed the former; somewhere between 1970 and 1985 I noticed, with regret, the disappearance of the latter.

The change is sociolological/psychological as much as linguistic, but I feel that we have lost more in the area of 'language as a useful sign of relationships' than we have gained in 'language as a pretence that we are all equal'.
 
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