Fascinating, guys. Your replies are making me think I need to rethink one very fundamental things about how I understand the language.
Is there just one
you with a singular and plural uses, or are there two
yous?
If there's just one
you, is it intrinsically singular and only can also be used for multiple people, or is it plural and can also be used for single persons?
I'd like to walk you through how I've got to the point I am at in how I feel about
you, so you can correct anything that's wrong in my understanding.
It all comes back to how I was taught English in school. Virtually every textbook in Poland uses the traditional first/second/third person singular/plural matrix to introduce personal pronouns and conjugation. I think it might be meant to help learners develop a sense of familiarity between how their first language and their desired second language work, but I'm not sure if it's the right approach, and whether it actually does more good than harm.
Singular:
1st - I - am/do
2nd - you - are/do
3rd - he/she/it - is/does
Plural:
1st - we - are/do
2nd - you - are/do
3rd - they - are/do
What I always disliked about this way of presenting it is that
you appears twice—first as a singular
you, second as a plural
you—which might give learners the impression that there are two distinct
yous that only happen to look exactly the same.
The only place where I can truly find a proof that there are two
yous is reflexive pronouns;
yourself and
yourselves clearly show a singular/plural split.
Not only is that redundant—that is if there truly only is one
you—it also unnecessarily disrupts an easy to learn pattern. All singular nouns go with
is/
does, and all plural nouns go with
are/
do. Since
you uses
are/
do, it must be plural.
Later on, when I graduated from school and started exploring the meanders of this language on my own, I found out that English did use to have a dedicated second person singular,
thou that used
art/
dost, but it got rid of it and started using
you to refer to/address both single persons and multiple people.
It started making sense why
you uses
are/
do, and that's when I started thinking of
you as an intrinsically plural pronoun that can also be used to refer to/address a single person, similarly to
they.
Singular:
he/she/it/guy - is/does
Plural:
we/you/they/guys - are/do
This would leave
I as a special case of behaving like neither singular nor plural, rather its own thing, but I'm okay with that because I'm special (;-)), and
I already uses
am that is nowhere else to be found.
This is, more or less, the mental picture of
you that I have.
Jutfrank's made a fantastic point.
It seems to me that there's definitely a kind of 'grammatical void' in English that wants to be filled by a second person plural pronoun.
This seems to directly contradict how I feel about
you. The emergence of
you all,
y'all,
all of you, and
you guys suggests that
you is perceived by native speakers as intrinsically singular, not plural. If it were the other way around, the grammatical void would've been filled with attempts to create something I will in my inaptness exemplify as
you one.
I have a lot of questions now, but let me just ask the ones from the beginning for now.
Is there just one
you with a singular and plural uses, or are there two
yous?
If there's just one
you, is it intrinsically singular and only can also be used for multiple people, or is it plural and can also be used for single persons?
