OT: Spanish pronouns ("usted", etc.)

On Wed, 16 May 2007 17:48:48 -0400, Alex Fink <a4pq1injbok_0@...> wrote:

>On Wed, 16 May 2007 02:50:54 +0100, Jeff Rollin <jeff.rollin@...> wrote:
>>In the last episode, on Tue, 15 May 2007 17:49:39 -0700, "David J.
>>Peterson" <dedalvs@...> wrote:
>>> Jeff wrote:
>>> <<
>>> Depends on your perspective, really. In (Peninsular) Spanish, with
>>> formal forms of address (using the polite "2nd person" pronouns
>>> "Usted" (sg) and "Ustedes" (pl), you use 3rd person agreement on the
>>> verb (since the forms originate in the formula "Vuestra Merced" "Your
>>> Grace" and, accordingly, refer obliquely to a second person using a
>>> 3rd person term).
>>>
>>> I always thought it came from Arabic "ustaadh" [?us.'taaD], a
>>> way to address someone with respect.  It always seemed like
>>> far too much of a coincidence that two words pronounced
>>> almost identically and with almost the exact same usage should
>>> be totally unrelated.  Apparently history says it's so, though.
>>
>>Well, my explanation is the only one I've heard right now, but that one
>>(yours) actually seems more plausible to me.
>
>I recall reading somewhere that the Romance-internal etymology of _Usted_
>was indubitably the correct one, since the timing was off for it to be an
>Arabic loan.  I tried finding the source again, though, and Google is much
>less certain than I expected.
>
>Anyway, why the insistence on deriving it from one xor the other?  I think
>the most likely scenario is that _vuestra merced_ and various contractions
>of it were a Romance-internal development, but pressure from Arabic helped
>select _Usted_ as the contraction that eventually won out.
>
>Alex

Spanish "usted" is not related to Arabic "ustaadh", the resemblance
is due to mere chance coincidence. Quoting from the sci.lang FAQ:

<QUOTE>

Usted

Some people have wondered if the Spanish formal second person
pronoun Usted came from the Arabic honorific 'usta:dh. It doesn't;
it's a well-attested abbreviation of vuestra merced 'your mercy'.
There are transitional forms such as vuasted, vuesarced, voarced
as well as parallel constructions like usía from vuestra señoría,
ucencia from vuestra excelencia. Compare also Portuguese
vossa mercê --> vosmecê --> você, as well as Catalán vosté and
Gallego vostede. Finally, note that the abbreviation Usted doesn't
appear until 130 years after the Moors had been kicked out of Spain.

</QUOTE>

There are transitional forms showing clearly the origin for the
parallel constructions, too, such as "ucencia", "vuecencia" and
"vuecelencia" from "vuestra excelencia" (all three appearing in
the RAE dictionary).

As a side note, the system of 2nd person pronouns used in Castilian
is symmetrical with formal/informal distinction both in the singular
and the plural: "tú" vs. "usted", "vosotros" vs. "ustedes". The
original Latin forms for the 1st and 2nd plural, "nos" and "vos",
had become formal singular in meaning during the Middle Ages
(a development similar to the "royal we" and the singularization of
plural "you" in English), prompting the repluralizations "nosotros"
and "vosotros" with suffixed "otros" (others) (similarly to how
"you" is now repluralized in English dialectal forms like "youse"
and "y'all"); which, by the way, also introduced gender distinction
in these forms: "nosotros" (we male) vs. "nosotras" (we female),
"vosotros" (y'all male) vs. "vosotras" (y'all female). The forms
"nos" and "vos" are nowadays archaic (like English "thou"),
except in certain parts of Latin America where a separate use
of "vos" as informal pronoun has developed.

In all of Latin America the singular informal pronoun "vosotros"
has also been lost in favor of "ustedes", now used both in formal
and informal situations, but the 2nd person singular still
distinguishes between "tú" (or "vos") and "usted" (in some areas
all three are used, with "vos" now being the _lowest_ in the
honorific scale). However, in certain dialects of Central America
the asymmetry introduced into the system by the loss, only in
the plural, of the formal/informal distinction, has been resolved
by dropping the honorific distinction altogether and generalizing
the use of the originally formal pronouns "usted" and "ustedes"
to all cases regardless of formality, using "usted" even to talk
to a child, so in those dialects the verbal person paradigms
have been efectively reduced to only four:

(yo) canto / bebo / parto / soy / he
(usted/él/ella/ello) canta / bebe / parte / es / ha
(nosotros/nosotras) cantamos / bebemos / partimos / somos / hemos
(ustedes/ellos/ellas) cantan / beben / parten / son / han

The full system of personal distinctions in Spanish is rather
convoluted, with up to 8 distinct verbal person paradigms
(1st sg/pl, 2nd sg/pl, 3rd sg/pl, Argentinian/Chilean voseo):

(1st sg) canto / bebo / parto / soy / he
(2nd sg) cantas / bebes / partes / eres / has
(3rd sg) canta / bebe / parte / es / ha
(1st pl) cantamos / bebemos / partimos / somos / hemos
(2nd pl) cantáis / bebéis / partís / sois / habéis
(Arg vos) cantás / bebés / partís / sos / has
(Chil vos) cantai / bebís / partís / soi, erís / habís, hai
(3rd pl) cantan / beben / parten / son / han

matched in a complex system of agreements with around twenty
different pronoun forms (not counting the aformentioned variations
in transitional forms of "usted", "usía" and "vuecelencia"), which
show various distinctions of gender and formality:


1st person singular

- "yo" (standard)

- "nos" (royal we, 1st-person plural agreement, nowadays archaic)

- "menda" (very informal/vulgar, 3rd-person agreement, usually though
not necessarily preceded by an article or demonstrative, which allows
gender distinction: "[el/este/un] menda" (I male), "[la/esta/una] menda"
(I female); it can also be used to refer to an indeterminate 3rd person;
the word is originally from Caló, the Spanish-Romani dialect of Spanish
gypsies, and appears to have been the dative form of the 1st person
pronoun, thus sharing origin with Spanish/English forms like "me")


1st person plural

- "nosotros" (male or gender-neutral)

- "nosotras" (female only)


2nd person singular

- "tú" (standard informal in most areas; also used with Chilean
voseo verbal agreement in Chile)

- "vos" (two separate kinds: the reverential "vos", which is formal,
archaic and uses same verbal forms as "vosotros"; and the Latin
American "vos", which some dialects, notably Rioplatense, use
as the standard informal, while others use it as a more vulgar
alternative to "tú", and which can be used with four verbal paradigms
depending on dialect: the "tú" forms, the "vosotros" forms, the
Argentinian voseo forms, or the Chilean voseo forms)

- "usted" (3rd-person agreement, standard formal, also used informally
in Andalusian and Central American dialects; also used with 2nd-person
verbal agreement in Andalusia; variants include "uced", "vusted",
"vuasted", "vuesarced", "usarced", etc., all of them contractions
from "Vuestra Merced" meaning "Your Mercy"; the abbreviation
"Vd." for "usted" comes from the original "Vuestra Merced",
although nowadays it has become common to abbreviate it "Ud.")

- "sumercé" (3rd-person agreement, used in some parts of Latin America
with same meaning as "usted"; contracted from "Su Merced" analogously
to how "Vuestra Merced" contracted to "usted", but this time with the
3rd-person possessive form "Su" instead of the reverential possessive
form "Vuestra", because 3rd-person agreement of semantic 2nd person
had already become associated with formality because of "usted")

- "usía" (3rd-person agreement, usage restricted to overly formal
or sarcastic; variants include "vusía", "usiría", "vusiría", "useñoría",
"vueseñoría", etc., all of them contractions from "Vuestra Señoría"
meaning "Your Lordiness")

- "vuecelencia" (3rd-person agreement, usage restricted to overly
formal or sarcastic; variants include "vuecencia", "ucencia", "usencia",
"vosencia", etc., all of them contractions from "Vuestra Excelencia"
meaning "Your Excellency")


2nd person plural

- "vosotros" (informal, male or gender-neutral, currently used only
in Spain)

- "vosotras" (informal, female only, currently used only in Spain)

- "ustedes" (gender-neutral, 3rd-person agreement, formal in Spain
but both formal and informal in Andalusia and Latin America; also
used with 2nd-person verbal agreement in Andalusia)

- "sumercedes" or "sumercés" (ditto as above for "sumercé")

- "usías" (ditto as above for "usía")

- "vuecelencias" (ditto as above for "vuecelencia")


3rd person singular

- "él" (male or gender-neutral)

- "ella" (female only)

- "ello" (neuter, usage limited to abstractions)


3rd person plural

- "ellos" (male or gender-neutral)

- "ellas" (female only)


The picture gets further complicated when considering the full
declination, which introduces an additional 3rd person reflexive
oblique pronoun (se); has distinct prepositional case (mí, ti, sí)
and comitative case (conmigo, contigo, consigo) only for the
1st-sg, 2nd-sg and 3rd-reflexive pronouns; distinguishes between
accusative and dative only in the third person (la[s]/lo[s] vs. le[s]);
and neutralizes all gender distinctions in the 1st- and 2nd-person
oblique case forms (me, te, nos, os) and in the dative case forms
of the third person, while introducing gender distinction in the
accusative of the 2nd-person pronouns that prompt 3rd-person
agreement. The phenomena of "leísmo", "laísmo" and "loísmo",
affecting the usage of the oblique forms of the third person
pronouns, are related to these asymmetries in the gender and
accusative/dative distinctions, compounded with the fact that
Spanish further blurs the morphological distinction of direct and
indirect objects by marking dative phrases with the preposition
"a" (to), but also animate-referent accusatives so as to prevent
semantic ambiguity between subject and object given that word
order is not enough unlike in English ("El perro mordió a Juan"
or "A Juan mordió el perro" meaning "The dog bit John",
vs. "Al perro mordió Juan" or "Juan mordió al perro" meaning
"John bit the dog"). In the Castilian dialects of northern Castile,
such as the one of Valladolid, both leísmo and laísmo are
widespread, effectively eliminating the accusative/dative
distinction from the system in favor of gender distinctions.
Additionally, the form "se" has many other uses apart from
3rd-person reflexive, such as marking medial-voice and
impersonal verbal forms; particularly, it replaces the dative
"le[s]" when followed by an accusative to avoid cacophonic
alliteration (*le las doy > se las doy, *les lo dije > se lo dije).
Since this causes the number distinction of the dative to be
lost, in Latin American dialects it prompts the accusative to
take the plural mark of the dative (*les lo dije > se los dije).

So, in a word, the system of personal pronouns of my native
language is *weird*. :o)

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