Re: Romance WE
| From: | Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, January 1, 2004, 18:57 |
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On Thu, Jan 01, 2004 at 01:41:24PM -0500, Doug Dee wrote:
> I seem to recall that the Spanish Nosotros/as is historically a compound of
> "nos" + another word ("others"?).
Yes. Formed by analogy with "vosotros", ("you [pl] others"), which was
coined to be the new 2p plural pronoun after "vos" was co-opted to be a
singular polite one instead.
An exactly analogous thing happened in Cajun(?) French with "nous"/"vous" ->
"nous-autres"/"vous-autres", but I think French "autres" has the same
form in both genders, so there's still no gender distinction in the
pronoun.
-Mark
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