Re: Old Norse (was Re: New to the list)

Padraic Brown wrote:

> On Sat, 17 Jun 2000, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
>
> >Padraic Brown wrote:
> >
> >> >And I think she misses
> >> >her 'usted', poor thing (in Iceland, any single person is "þú", whether s/he
> >> >is the president, a worker, an infant, or a cat). As regards English, the
> >> >honorific pronoun has overtaken the normal 'thou' (I know you know that).
> >>
> >> Actually no. At best a quasi honorific. Only used when addressing God:
> >> and that, I think, is only because in Latin he is addressed "tu".
> >> I.e., a direct translation. If I remember right, there was a
> >> flirtation in Middle English with honorific pronouns, but it never
> >> caught on. I think using ye or you as a singular honorific.
> >
> >No, actually, what he said is right.  "Thou" was always the standard
> >singular second person pronoun, until sometime around Shakespeare's
> >time, when "you", formerly only the second person plural, started to be
> >used for the honorific singular second person.  Eventually, it overtook
> >it entirely, eliminating the singular/plural distinction.
[snip]

> (Standard) English now doesn't have an honorific - at least in my
> opinion - it has one form doing double duty for singular and plural.
> Either that, or we "honour" everyone equally crappy. :)
Well, the way I interpreted his statement was that "[what was]
an honorific pronoun has overtaken the normal 'thou'".  Certainly,
we can agree there are no honorific pronouns in English today.

> >   by Senator Ralph Izard of South Carolina upon the stout vice
> >   president: 'His Rotundity'."
>
> :D The seedy side of these Founding Fathers we hold so dear!
Oh yes.  If people think politics is bad now, just read newspapers
from the 1800 election.  The most serious allegations made
by the Adams campaign against Thomas Jefferson, a deist, were that
he was an atheist (which is tantamount to saying:  "you don't believe
exactly as I do"), and  the whole Sally Hemmings slave-love-child
thing, which, as we all now know, is true -- Hemmings' descendents,
at least, have Jefferson DNA.  Jefferson still won, in part because
the States didn't particularly like each other, and a powerless EU-style
federal government suited states'-righters like Jefferson just fine.

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
ICQ#: 4315704   AIM: trwier
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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