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.
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.
In English particularly, people associate "thou" with the King James Bible and similar Christian texts ("Our Father, thou art in Heaven…") and might reasonably assume that if "thou" was used to address the literal God, it must have been the formal pronoun – but the familial, informal one was used exactly because of the "father" association! (OTOH there certainly are languages with a tu/vous distinction where children were expected to "vous" their own parents – not sure how much of a thing it is these days).
Another fun thing is that calling someone you don't know "thou" used to be an intentional insult ("you're not worthy of being called 'you'"), something that might be missed by a modern reader of Shakespeare or other EME texts.
It depends a lot on where you were brought up, and the language you were exposed to. My first association would be a very Yorkshire, “Thou knowest,” rather than the king james.
... thar knows nowt!
> (OTOH there certainly are languages with a tu/vous distinction where children were expected to "vous" their own parents – not sure how much of a thing it is these days).
It's interesting that in Viennese German (my German is terrible but I do at least try) it seems like the informal form is the default, in a shop I get asked "Braucht du hilfe?" rather than the formal "Kann ich Ihnen helfen?".
Maybe this is what they mean when they say people in Vienna are rude, but coming from Scotland using informal language even in fairly serious settings just seems comfortable and normal.
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...").
Similarly, Spanish "vuestra merced" evolved to "usted".
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).
As in 'please', from 'if you please'?
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-q...
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?
AirPods Pro :)
Whoppers junior
Passersby
Light fantastic
Hards on
This sucks because yes its a mistake or no its not a mistake both fit
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.
It's confusing because it was stated wrongly.
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".
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.
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.
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!
Leaning on Chaucer isn't sufficient, because it was once a pronoun used for people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_(pronoun)
So maybe we should bring back it, or ignore Chaucer as an authority.
"They" has always (in our lifetimes) been used to refer to a singular person of unknown gender. For example "someone left their coat here. They must be cold"
Indeed. What's new is not referring to someone of unknown gender as "they", but rather people identifying as non-gender-specific, and wanting to be referred to as "they". That's the part that feels so awkward, IMHO, not simply they as one person.