I’d originally intended to include this in the Does God speak of other Gods? thread, but it swelled past the original limited question to include a more general question regarding the etymology of the “Royal We.”
My original question regarded Hebrew and the formal plural. Per Wikipedia, Hebrew does maintain the T-V distinction. The article is not particularly clear on how it operates grammatically, but it seems as if formality is expressed more or less by speaking to someone in the third person. On my limited experience, this is rather unusual–I’ve normally seen formality expressed (in Russian, Spanish, French–German uses the third person plural instead) by use of the second person plural.
Is the second person plural not used to indicate formality in Hebrew, and is my understanding of how formality is indicated correct?
More broadly, is the majestic plural etymologically/linguistically related to the T-V distinction? Again, the wikipedia article doesn’t speak to this question. I’m specifically curious if the majestic plural developed from the T-V distinction, or whether it occurred independently. A bit of Googling suggests that it may have, but hopefully there’s a friendly linguist here to help me out.
My Hebrew is pretty lousy now, but once upon a time, it was pretty good and I think I would remember something as odd as that - and I don’t. Perhaps it’s used in Biblical Hebrew? Israel is a very, very informal society and it’s difficult to imagine someone feeling the need for a formal “you” in any situation. (I’m sure there are words for “Mr” and “Mrs”, but I never learned them.) I certainly never addressed my Hebrew teachers as “hamorah”, but as…well, Michal or Nomi or whatever their names were.
I’m assuming the canonical example is the French, tu used for family and intimate friends, vous used formally. I’m no expert, but in biblical Hebrew, I don’t think there’s such a distinction. There’s masculine vs feminine “you” but the same word is used if addressing one “you” or many “you.” And there’s not a more formal form: God is addressed with the same “you” (masculine singular), Pharaoh is addressed by the same “you.” If there were a more formal form of address, surely it would have been used in addressing God or Pharaoh?
There’s a difference between singular and plural 2nd person, but it’s not a difference in formality, just in the number of people being addressed.
I’m studying Biblical Hebrew now, but I haven’t read many texts other than those in Genesis (and a little of 2 Samuel) so I don’t know how the later parts are written. AFAIK, Biblical Hebrew does not have an informal 2nd person and a formal 2nd person, like Spanish.
I didn’t quite get that from the article. The formality is expressed only in certain contexts, and this seems more like replacement of the 2nd person pronoun by a circumlocution rather than fixing a given pronoun as the formal 2nd person pronoun. This is much more common in Japanese and Malay, where it’s done for anyone in any context.
So generally, Hebrew is more like Arabic, which gets by fine without any T-V distinction.
Italian is the one language I know of that always uses the 3rd person pronoun for formal singular “you.” Lei literally means ‘she’, but the gender agreement depends on whether the actual referent is male or female. Compare “Lei è una donna” (you are a woman) and “Lei è un uomo” (you are a man, but literally it reads “She is a man”). Meanwhile lei still means ‘she’ used in the 3rd person, so when it’s the 2nd person formal pronoun it’s always capitalized to indicate the difference.
Formerly, there were three levels of politeness in Italian: voi (corresponding to French vous), the second person plural, was for ordinary politeness while Lei was a higher level, for royalty, nobility, bishops, etc. Lei originally stood for titles of nobility or royalty which happened to be grammatically feminine, like Vostra Altezza ‘Your Highness’. Nowadays voi as the polite 2nd person singular is pretty much obsolete. If they would revive it, then Italian would be easier for French speakers to grasp intuitively.
