Re: German 'duzen' and 'siezen' - etymology ?

Andreas Johansson skrev:
> Quoting Lars Finsen <lars.finsen@...>:
>
>> Den 20. okt. 2006 kl. 11.41 skrev Henrik Theiling:
>>> But I really get annoyed by Ikea having started to
>>> address their customers as 'Du' on all the signs.
>>> Probably that's considered much more cool(tm) and
>>> dynamic(tm). It feels like an insult to me -- I don't
>>> know them anonymous advertising and managing people and
>>> my only potential interest is of purely commercial
>>> nature, so 'Du' is totally out of place.
>> Is this specific for Ikea or do you see it in other
>> advertising as well? Maybe it's something the Ikea people
>> are taking with them from Sweden. Swedes are a little
>> more formal than Norwegians, but not much. In Norway the
>> duzen-siezen divide has all but disappeared. You hardly
>> even use the 'polite' pronoun to the king.
>
> Hehe. In Sweden, you're not supposed to use a pronoun at
> all when addressing the king, but to say _kungen_ "the
> king" all the time.
Which I, as a republican -- in the anti-monarchial as
opposed to the American party-political sense -- am not
quite sure how I should react to. It beats _Ers Majestät_
any day, of course.

>> There is some tendency for reviving it, but very weak.
>> The feeling I get if someone tries to say 'De' to me is
>> one of unfriendliness.
>
> Similarly here. I do tend to switch to _ni_ when
> addressing adult strangers, but some find even that
> disagreeable. Of course, as I imagine BP will jump in to
> point out, the use of the sg _ni_ has a somewhat
> convoluted history in Swedish, since there was a period
> when it was the formal way of addressing people not
> important enough to have a title.
IIRC I've ranted about that more than once, so why should I
repeat myself. Search the archives! Suffice it to say that I
have a very negative gut reaction to singular _ni_, which
has nothing to do with its convoluted history so much as
signalling sniffiness, just as Lars said

: The feeling I get if someone tries to say 'De' to me is
: one of unfriendliness.

from a Norwegian POV.

When reading Henrik's statement that

| It feels like an insult to me -- I don't know them
| anonymous advertising and managing people and my only
| potential interest is of purely commercial nature, so 'Du'
| is totally out of place.

it occurred to me that in contemporary Swedish the
equivalent is to over-use a persons first name when
addressing them, as when telemarketers put "Benct" into
every sentence, implying an intimacy which doesn't exist.
Consequently using a person's first name when addressing
them is an important way of signalling intimacy in Swedish,
at least for this speaker, and indeed I find myself using my
family's first names a lot. A kind of equivalent of the
English use of first vs. last names, although here it is
use vs. non-use of first names.

Do you (Andreas) have the same perception, and does it apply
to Norwegian too, Lars and Taliesin?

BTW the best way to counter unwanted use of _ni_ is to
answer in the first person singular. Puts them off totally.
I'm not sure what the equivalent strategy with unwanted
Norwegian _De_, or unwanted German _du_, or over-use of
personal names might be, although with sales-persons plural
_ni_ (referring to the company as a collective) is of some
use. Any suggestions?

/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

    a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot

                                 (Max Weinreich)


--


/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

    a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot

                                 (Max Weinreich)

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