Likewise, when the Mouth of Sauron addresses Gandalf as “thou”, the intention was to show that Mouth thought himself superior to Gandalf and everyone else present.
The use of the “thou” pronouns referring to God was meant to suggest social closeness with him. In other words, we’re supposed to be friends with the Almighty.
In the south of England, “thee” and “thou” passed out of use around the 17th century. According to the link, this occurred because at that time the class system was in flux, and it was no longer clear if a random stranger was inferior or superior to you socially. So people started addressing everyone as “you”, just to avoid any difficulty.
As @Filbert’s post illustrates, the old pronouns held out quite a bit longer in the North.
As in French today, the formal pronoun in German used to be the plural second person: ihr, euch, and euer. For formal address, at some point this was replaced with the plural third person pronouns, only capitalized: Sie, Ihnen, and Ihre. So in German, when you address somebody formally you are actually calling them “They”. This has always struck me as odd and I don’t know when or why it changed.
Wild guess: the plural second person (nowadays used for informal/familiar = “you all”) started losing its formal significance as a singular through the decline of the aristocratic stranglehold on government in all those little dukedoms and principalities in favour of the middle/professional classes, particularly after 1848.
Or maybe Joseph II’s reforms had something to do with it. But that’s a different question.
This use of the third person plural for the formal address in German is indeed strange. German Wikipedia contains some vague and non-conclusive speculations about the origins of this, but it seems to boil down to the fact that there were, originally, different variations of formal address, such as using the second person plural or the third person singular as in other European languages, and the third person plural as the one that was considered the most distanced and most respectful was the one that stuck. The third person singular, in particular, used to be widespread, especially for use by aristocrats or monarchs towards inferiors, and still exists in some regional dialects. The modern standard form, however, is the third person plural, and in everyday usage it is not consciously perceived by German speakers as the third person plural form (which, linguistically, it is indeed) but simply as another conjugated form of the verb for certain situations.
Something similar happened in Spanish, only it is a third person singular from that has become the formal singular you, and a third person plural has become the plural you. How it happened is pretty well documented. At some point in the Middle Ages, people of very high status were spoken to in the third person using the expression “Your Grace” (Vuestra Merced). For example, “Your Grace is correct, the peasants need to work harder!” or “Does Your Grace wish to use the silver spoons or the gold spoons for lunch?” The expression “Vuestra Merced” got abbreviated to a single word “Usted” (or “Ustedes” for plural) and the definition of high status got dumbed down a lot, until it applied to most adults. But in recent decades the infomral ‘tu’ (a cognate of English ‘thou’, I suspect) has made a bit of a comeback.
As I understand it, this depends a lot on the country in question. In some parts of Latin America, “usted” and “ustedes” have practically replaced “tú” and “vos” even in informal situations, whereas in Spain, “tú” is gaining ground and replacing “usted”.
Bu the standards of hobbit society and their position in it, they pretty much were exactly that. In the films, I thought the actors playing those roles did a great job capturing the easygoing aristocratic manner that you’d expect.
Well, “this depends a lot on the country” is the answer to almost any questions about the Spanish language.
Spain did retain an informal second person plural, in contrast to Latin America, which uses the formal “ustedes” for any plural you, no matter how informal.
But when I speak to people from South America they use ‘tu’ and/or ‘vos’ (depending on the country, of course) quite freely; alongside the formal “usted”.
“Hard” and “soft” are nonexistent in phonetics. (Except for the literal physical objects, the hard palate and soft palate.)
The sound represented by ⟨th⟩ in thou is voiced /ð/.
The sound represented by ⟨th⟩ in think is unvoiced /θ/.
These are both dental (a.k.a. interdental) fricatives.
The Baggins, Took, and Brandybuck families were all “gentlehobbits”, so to speak. But ISTM that the social status of Pippin and Merry was a cut above that. Pippin’s father was the hereditary Thain of the whole Shire, and Merry’s was the Master of Brandy Hall, who was essentially in charge of Buckland plus some of the territory west of the river. In a way, therefore, they were a bit like princes in that little world.
I was overlooking that point. My impression is that British royalty is a gulf apart from British aristocracy, perhaps almost as much as between the royal family and commoners. Clearly, Denethor’s status was one of royalty, even though he “is not called a king”.
Yeah. There’s a bit in Gene Wolfe’s “Book of the New Sun” about the many social levels in far future Urth - the people in the lower levels underestimate the number of levels above them. Pippin and Merry are aristocratic enough to know how much below royalty they are
Took me a minute to figure out what you meant; the Complete Kaddish, which is different from the much better known Mourner’s Kaddish only in that it includes one line about “our Father in Heaven”. The analogy fails insofar as the Lord’s Prayer is AFIAK very well known by Christians, while this Kaddish is recited only once per service, only in more traditional services, and is zipped through at breakneck speed by the rabbi, so I doubt one in a hundred Jews who could rattle off the Mourner’s Kaddish in their sleep would even recognize that line out of context. The relevant word is “avuhon”, and I have no idea what connotations that may have in Aramaic, but my traditional prayerbooks translate it as “Father”.
A whole bunch of Hebrew prayers address God as “Aveinu”, which straightforwardly means “our father” and is the same word siblings in the Bible use when talking about their actual fathers. Likewise, every translation I have ever seen for “aveinu” either uses “our father” or deliberately mistranslates as something like “our parent” or “our source” in the name of gender inclusion/eschewing anthropomorphism. I’ve never heard any suggestion that it would be appropriate for a translator to go for a particularly informal tone here.
Hebrew, like Latin, doesn’t have distinct formal and informal pronouns, so any translator into a language that does will have to err on one side or the other.
