Re: Second person/polite pronouns (fuit Re: Another Ozymandias)

From: "Sally Caves" <scaves@...>
Sent: Thursday, July 27, 2006 4:33 AM

>> I for instance would have been adressed as Kandidaten
>> (i.e. the academic Candidate degree9 for most of
>> my life.  In fact _min Herre/Herrn_ or _Frun_ was used
>> only with people so lowly as to not have any occupational
>> tiles, although servants would address their employers
>> with these titles, and _Frun_ of course was the correct
>> address for a housewife, so there were proportionally
>> more women addressed _Frun_ than there were men adressed
>> _Herrn_ -- once you knew their occupation that is.
>
> Interesting.  Sounds like the "Sehr geerhter Herr Doktor
> Professor Wilhelm Wolfgang."
> Too cumbersome in T; everybody is Hmeo if you are being
> respectful. Although maybe I'll adapt that for formal
> letters.
That seems very Austrian or Swiss German to me, although I
don't know to what extent they use titles in Switzerland.
My dad once worked in Switzerland for a year, and he was
addressed as "Herr Ingenieur" instead of plain "Herr
Becker" -- Here in *Germany* (de-DE so to speak), you're
addressed as "Herr X" or "Frau X" once you seem old enough
to be called so, but not throughout: you usually use the
2nd person plural pronoun "Sie" to address people after
greeting -- as Sally said later in her posting, this is only
a matter of politeness and general respect. Besides, note
that the pronouns belonging to "Sie" are always written with
a capital first letter. You did that with the familiar 2nd
person "Du" as well in letters until they reformed the
orthography. Now that they reformed it again (and again and
again ...), they reinforced the capitalization of _du_. I
don't know whether this might be of interest in this
discussion, I just wanted to mention it.

As for my Ayeri conpeople, they would use the 2nd person
singular pronoun _eva_ as familiar pronoun and the 2nd
person plural pronoun _va_ as the polite form, though
colloquially, _eva_ tends to be reduced to _va_ as well. And
then, there's the honorable pronoun _vay_, which you use to
address a really honorable person, like a king, or gods/God
(haven't decided yet) -- this should not imply that kings
have a god-like status, though!

Carsten


NB (this is *VERY* OT, though): Y'all are aware that the
list turns 15 years old this Saturday? It was started on my
brother's birthday coincidentally, which is July 29, 1991,
which is why I remembered the date. I dug out the first
postings to the list some time ago when I downloaded some
of the Old Archives (i.e. the ones of the years before
1997).

--
"Miranayam kepauarà naranoaris." (Kalvin nay Hobbes)
Tingraena, Tyemuyang 18, 2315 ya 26:00:32 pd