Re: Engish 2sg/pl

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Monday, May 05, 2003 3:08 PM
Subject: Re: Engish 2sg/pl


> On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 10:07:09AM +0700, Daniel Ryan Prohaska wrote:
> > In my dialect, or I should rather say my grandad's, bacause my
> > generation doesn't use it anymore, the distinction was still in
> > place. In his Lancashire dialect he used to say "tha" for the
> > familiar singular and "ya"/"you" for the plural, and when speaking
> > "proper". One still hears older people using phrases such as
> > "tha knows it, dussen't?", "where 'asta bin" and the like.
>
> Wow.  It's amazing that remnants of "thou" were still around only
> two generations ago.  It's completely gone in the US, but then, it
> was already pretty much completely gone from most of England when the
> US was settled.
>
> Certain isolated religious communities, such as the Amish and
> Mennenites, do still use a form of it.  Oddly, though, they seem
> to use "thee" as both subject and object, with the "you" form of
> the verb ("Thee are late.  Where have thee been?"), which sounds
> very wrong to me.
>
> When I was taking Spanish in a high school in Middle Georgia,
> my instructor remarked upon how much easier it was to render
> certain Spanish concepts into Southern than into standard English.
> Besides having "y'all" for 2nd person plural, we also have the
> three locatives "here", "there", and "yonder".  Personally, when
> I translated into English from Spanish,  I used "thou/thee" for
> singular and "y'all" for plural, just so the reader could tell
> immediately from the English whether it was singular or plural -
> even if it sounded a little weird. :)
>
> -Mark
>
So you could have 'what dost thou think' and 'what do y'all think' in the
same text ;-)