Timeline for Is English unusual in having no second person plural form?
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28 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 8, 2021 at 11:03 | answer | added | fdb | timeline score: 0 | |
| Jul 8, 2021 at 8:21 | answer | added | Brian | timeline score: -2 | |
| Sep 23, 2019 at 15:39 | answer | added | Xwtek | timeline score: 6 | |
| Jul 21, 2019 at 23:43 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | Among reasonably familiar European languages, and since you mention Spanish, most dialects of European Portuguese are somewhat similar in that they have a 2sg (tu), but no 2pl (vos is still used in some northern dialects, but it’s dead in most of the country), using exclusively the originally polite-marked 3pl (vocês, cognate with ustedes). Many Brazilian dialects have taken it one step further and lost the singular as well, essentially losing the second person entirely. | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 15:11 | comment | added | LjL | Hmm, well, languages aren't really based on logic like that, and the current plural forms "are" evolved from a paradigm when plural forms were not all the same. "You" can most definitely be singular in today's language. Considering it "not singular" because it was plural historically seems like an anachronism. | |
| Jul 18, 2019 at 15:07 | comment | added | Shautieh | @LjL the thing is, all plural forms are the same (are/were), which means there is a logic in there. If you argue that "you" is singular, which it is not, then you throw that tiny spark of logic out of the window, and make English look even more arbitrary than it already is. | |
| Jul 13, 2019 at 16:17 | comment | added | LjL | @Shautieh I'm not sure I understand what you mean: it's true that "are" and "were" are used for all the (other) plural forms, but then the whole verb "to be" is quite irregular, so I imagine "am" and "is" are also weird irregularities to learners... and if "thou" were still around, that'd be "thou art", which is yet different from the other forms. All in all the verb "to be" has to be learned as seemingly arbitrary forms for each person. | |
| Jul 13, 2019 at 13:15 | comment | added | Shautieh | @LjL I agree it doesn't impact current usage (I was never told that whilst learning English), but it just makes much more sense to consider that English stopped using the singular thou altogether, and English speakers only use the plural/formal you. This way "you ARE", "you WERE", etc. stop being the weird irregularities that many people struggle with at first. | |
| Jul 12, 2019 at 21:46 | comment | added | LjL | @Shautieh that would be true diacronically, but syncronically, it would make no sense to claim that English lacks either the singular or the plural form: they are just the same, and the fact they are historically derived from a plural is interesting but it doesn't really impact their current usage. | |
| Jul 10, 2019 at 18:32 | comment | added | Shautieh | Why do you think it's "you are", when "are" is used for all plural forms? "You" has always been the plural, and as it came to replace the singular "thou" it's more correct to say that "English has no second person singular form". | |
| Jul 10, 2019 at 15:32 | comment | added | Colin Fine | @David: yes, and that pattern is common, as mentioned in various answers. I was specifically commenting on the original question's mention of French, and of second person plural for singular (which is not the case in German or Spanish). | |
| Jul 10, 2019 at 12:32 | comment | added | David | @ColinFine German was similar when I was growing up. Sie (formal/plural) was used except within families and between friends; those other more "initmate" relationships used Du. My understanding (I haven't been to Germany in years) is that this has changed, now Sie is used only in very formal settings e.g. when addressing a government official, say, a judge. | |
| Jul 10, 2019 at 12:17 | comment | added | J... | Which languages are you considering? Just Indo-European? Plenty of language families deal with things like plurals and conjugations completely differently than Indo-European languages. | |
| Jul 10, 2019 at 8:33 | comment | added | Caius Jard | The beauty of English is that it can mold and adapt itself in response to common use and take on new words. There seems a rising tide of people writing/saying yous in common parlance. Over time I expect this will morph into you's, use (as a result of auto-correction algorithms trying their best) and finally uz. Whether any of these delights will achieve recognition by a respected dictionary, I've no idea | |
| Jul 9, 2019 at 23:16 | comment | added | gen-ℤ ready to perish | Apropos y’all: the population of the southern US states constitutes 15 % of English speakers worldwide. | |
| Jul 9, 2019 at 17:43 | comment | added | Stormblessed | @jpmc26 and Chris — I said specifically standard English; y'all is used informally in some dialects, but you'd very rarely hear it, say, in Britain. | |
| Jul 9, 2019 at 17:23 | comment | added | Chris B. Behrens | @jpmc26 - or "you guys"? | |
| Jul 9, 2019 at 15:00 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackLinguist/status/1148607856364675073 | ||
| Jul 9, 2019 at 12:55 | comment | added | jpmc26 | Y'all never heard of "y'all"? ;D | |
| Jul 9, 2019 at 12:39 | comment | added | RedSonja | It does. Unfortunately it's the same as the singular form, just to confuse people. | |
| Jul 9, 2019 at 9:53 | history | edited | Sir Cornflakes |
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| Jul 9, 2019 at 9:13 | comment | added | Colin Fine | In French, vous is formally plural, and in "intimate" settings contrasts with singular tu; but in general settings vous is used for both singular and plural, so the result is very much like English. (I put "intimate" in quotes, because there isn't really a good English word for the contexts in which French speakers will use tu). | |
| Jul 9, 2019 at 8:30 | answer | added | Chronocidal | timeline score: 11 | |
| Jul 9, 2019 at 6:57 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Jul 9, 2019 at 1:47 | comment | added | LjL | In these case, the other languages you mentioned being Romance happens to be irrelevant: Germanic languages, like English is, do distinguish between 2nd person singular and 2nd person plural (German: du vs ihr, Swedish: du vs ni), and English itself had this distinction until not too long ago, with thou vs you, where thou has the same etimology as du and tú. If anything, the many varieties of Spanish come close to showing an evolution similar to English, where in some varieties vos (not quite the same as vosotros, but both derive from Latin vos) is now singular. | |
| Jul 8, 2019 at 23:24 | answer | added | b a | timeline score: 28 | |
| Jul 8, 2019 at 23:00 | review | First posts | |||
| Jul 9, 2019 at 4:48 | |||||
| Jul 8, 2019 at 22:56 | history | asked | Stormblessed | CC BY-SA 4.0 |