Re: [tied] Formal and Informal 2nd Person

----- Original Message -----
From: "Danny Wier" <dawier@...>
To: <cybalist@egroups.com>
Sent: Friday, August 04, 2000 3:01 AM
Subject: Re: [tied] Formal and Informal 2nd Person



I vaguely recall the plural of politeness is also used in
Tamil. Its use in Latin probably originated in the
rhetorical custom of addressing a single person in the
plural when the addressee represented other people beside
himself ("sed quid hoc loco vos inter vos, Catule?"). There
is a classical monograph devoted to T/V (tu/vos) forms of
address by Brown and Hanlon, but I don't remember its
bibliographical details. If anyone's interested I may look
for them.

Piotr

> Hindi also uses a new pronoun, <i>a:p</i>, but I forgot
what form the
> verb takes. Persian, which curiously already has many
things in common
> with English, uses the second person plural with no
distinction of
> politeness; the archaic second person singular went the
way of "thou"
> and "thee", found only in literary and poetic registers
and
> "ultra-formal" expressions.
>
> By the way, Persian in my opinion is one of the easiest
languages to
> learn for an English speaker. And it's even written in
Arabic script.