Re: Engish 2sg/pl

----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Ryan Prohaska" <daniel@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2003 4:07 AM
Subject: Engish 2sg/pl


> Stone Gordenssen
>
> <My English might be atypical - I learned to speak from television,
> picking
> <up that mid-west USA accent de rigueur on TV during the 1950s and
> 1960s.
> <Even that has shifted over the years to include in my spoken English
> both
> <"y'all" [ja:l] (hate English's lacks of a clear 2pl) and "eh" [e:\_R]
> as a
> <postive tag to questions, plus oddities such as "accent" ["{k.sEnt_d]
> and
> <"dog" [daG\], and dropping overly obvious prounouns.
> <Y'all are coming with, eh?
> <[<F>"ja:lar "kVmiN wIT e:\_R]
>
>
> I also hate the fact that English has difficulties distinguishing
> between 2 sg and pl. Especially when writing grammars and you don't have
> an exact equivalent! Historically spoken English lacks a 2sg rather than
> a 2pl as <you> goes back to the object form of 2pl. 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.
>
> Dan
>
Yes...I think it's a pity that that distinction looks doomed to
extinction...(ooh, rhyming sentence).