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Yeah, I thought maybe. So why not Þ/Y?
Francophonophilia? Could stand for tu/vos in Latin, too.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Did Latin ever indulge in this sort of linguistic brownnosing?
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Sure, Quintillian and Varro are always throwing Greek words and phrases around. Heavens know what the Etruscans did. The Hittites used a whole hella lot of Hattic and Sumerian, just to keep the gods appeased. I sometimes tune in a local TV station to listen to the Taglish (Tagalog/English). Bilingual human nature, I s'pose.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Well, yeahbut®, did they do funnies with pronouns like the English/French 2nd pl or the German/Spanish 3rd pl in singular contexts?
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I'm sorry, I must've misunderstood you. You weren't talking about using foreign terms when domestic ones would do, but pronominal paradigms with strange hijinks? I think most of the European lgs did it.
German
du / Ihr ~ Sie / Sie
where ihr is youse informal and her, and sie is she, they, and you formal sg/pl.
In English, lawspeak we use Your Honor and 3PS. Go figure.
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It's hard to keep track of what I'm talking about at any particular moment. I started off wonderin why T/V, which was, as you suggest, wondering why foreign paradigms were being used in an English context. Then I shifted to wondering whether Latin had this same sort of pronomial hijinks for purposes of sucking up to one's betters. How different modern languages handle this is a whole nother question. I'm sure Japanese would have a veritable treasure trove of funnies along these lines, but how many of them would be pronomial I wouldn't care to guess.
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journeyman
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journeyman
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Catullus is supposed to be the first one to use vos as singular in Latin, or the first one recorded anyway. I'm assuming Tom Stoppard is accuratel reporting Housman in "The Invention of Love", because that's where I learnt this.
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Yes, Japanese seems to be the archetypical case, but, as you suggest, it's not just pronominal. Japanese has many dual sets of words, one for mine and the other for thine. Okusan is somebody else's wife, but nyobo is my wife. Murakami has written novels in which the narrator is only known as boku 'I'. This pronoun is used amongst young males. Needless to say, it's hard to translate. Here's a list of first person pronouns I found online:
- Sessha (used by samurai, extremely polite)
- Watakushi (very polite, usually feminine)
- Watashi (standard/polite)
- Oira (used by monks)
- Atashi (female casual)
- Boku (mostly young male, also the poetic first person)
- Ore (almost exclusively male, somewhat rude, male "cool")
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To a mere English speaker the Indonesian pronoun system seems quite complicated enough, though I gather it's simplicity itself compared to Javanese and Sundanese.
I/me/my can be aku or saya, aku implying a more intimate relationship, saya being more neutral
You/you/your (singular) can be engkau, kau, kamu, again implying a more intimate relationship. If you don't have that relationship, you use a relationship term such as bapak (literally father) for older or higher status males, or ibu (literally mother) for older or higher status females, or just the person's name. These relationship terms can also be used by an older person to refer to themselves when talking to a younger one. Thus without the situation it's difficult to know whether Di mana mobil ibu? (literally Where is mother's car?) means Where is my car? Where is your car? Where is her (Mrs X's) car? or Where is mum's car?
He/she/him/her/his/her can all be translated as dia or if one is referring to someone of very high status: beliau. Again relationship terms can be used to substitute.
We/us/our = kami (exclusive) kita (inclusive).
You/you/your (plural) = kalian or Anda. Anda is for talking to everybody in general in notices, adverts, etc.
They/them/their = mereka.
This is a simplified version. It's a nightmare. I'm surprised people ever talk to each other for fear of offending by using the wrong pronoun.
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