I remembered reading that part of the confusion regarding “thou” becoming “you” and “ye” becoming “the” was due to misreading of older English characters. One of the old symbols for the “th” sound - þ (Alt-0254) - appeared similar to the written “y,” so later readers mixed up the pronunciation. It is now believed that “the” was never pronounced “ye,” and the signs saying “Ye Olde Tea Shoppe” are therefore both pretentious and wrong. I found an article discussing this at:
Speculation: The conversion from “thou” to “you” may have a similar story.
Speculation being incorrect in this case, since the usage of thou is well documented in written materials. The change to “you” is akin to the similar change found in all West and Central European cultural languages, which adopted the second person plural as second person singluar (formal, or non-intimate), except Spanish which took the bizzare route of adopting instead third person singular (usted, short for vuestra merced, meaning, “Your Grace.” (I should caution I’m not familiar enough with Portugese to know exactly what transformation occurs there).
I was under the impression that English was fairly odd in that the formal singular/plural form supplanted the intimate singular form instead of the other way around. I was under the impression that in other European languages the intimate form had become or was in the process of becoming less common than the formal. I know this is somewhat the case in German, in which Sie, while still widely used, is more restricted in use now than it was a generation or two ago, much as in English, the use of courtesy titles and last names has declined recently.
The Staff Report suggests this is not the case in France, noting that "only a good friend calls another Frenchman ‘tu.’ " Was I mistaken?
Not only in France, but in Spain the form of treatment between friends is tu . Usted is used only for persons you have no intimacy.
In Germany and in Italy friends treat one another by du and tu , respectively. The forms Sie and lei , wich coincidentally mean she are used as courtesy pronouns.
There were two signs for ‘th’ (both corresponding to a different sound)in Middle English, the thorn (Þ,þ ) and the eth (Ð,ð ) and both were used in different dialects of Middle English in the defintive article, i.e.
Northern dialect, The Cursor Mundi c.1300:
East midland, The Bestiary
It is easy to see how the thorn could be mistaken for a ‘y’, especially in an elaborate script (also note that though both the example quoted uses exclusively one ‘th’ sound, this was not always the case some dialects would use different ‘th’ sounds for different words).
you can also see in the second example the word ‘ðu’ this is the word ‘thou’ and you can see it definetly starts with a ‘th’ sound.
Well they weren’t (to tell the truth I’d have to look up the exact difference in sound, but it has been discussed on Straight Dope before), I can quote you an example which includes both the thorn and the eth in the same passage.
That doesn’t prove a thing. Bright’s Old English Grammar & Reader, 3rd Edition, a standard collegiate text, says flat-out that the two were used interchangeably, with the sound varying according to context, voiced only when occurring as a single letter between two voiced sounds, except when the first was part of a prefix. The same rule applied to f, which could be pronounced as /f/ or /v/, or s, which could be pronounced /s/ or /z/.
Hmm, a bit more research tells me that it isn’t entirely agreed upon, some saying the two are largely interchnagable other’s saying that the thorn and eth represent voiced and unvoiced sounds repectively as I have heard:
I’d have to check this, but perhaps the two only became interchanable at a later date as I have Old English and very early Middle English sources that use both letters in the same passages but after the first half of the thirteenth century writers seem to only use one character for the th sound (including in some cases using the eth in the word ‘the’, something that doesn’t seem to happen beforfe this time).
BTW, welcome aboard, InfntJest! Where outside Chicago do you reside? Did you know we Chi-Dopers have a fairly robust practice of RL get-togethers? It would be great to have somebody else to encourage meetings outside of the North Side.
(getting pissy about “Ye Olde Whatever” signs seems as good an indication as any that someone will stick around )
In the era when thorn, etc. were still used, spelling was far from codified. A given writer might use a certain spelling style, but it varied from writer to writer. Ergo, “interchangably” is correct if you are referring to different writers, and frequently correct even when referring to one writer who just didn’t care about spelling.
My Chambers Etymological Dict. of the English Language blames printers on the “y” substitution. If they didn’t have any dies of an uncommon letter, they’d substitute one that looked similar. I.e., people reading the handwritten version would have known it wasn’t “y”.
“Sie” does not mean “she” when you address someone. It means “they”.
“Wie fühlen Sie sich?” would literally translate to “How do they feel?”, and not “How does she feel?”. In order the latter to be the case, the question would have to be “Wie fühlt sie sich?”.
For english speakers there is a simple rule on how to know when to address someone as Du or Sie: if you would address the person as “mr” or “mrs” at home, you will address them with “Sie” in Germany/Austria/Switzerland. If you would address them by their first names instead, you will use the “Du”.
<< For english speakers there is a simple rule on how to know when to address someone as Du or Sie: if you would address the person as “mr” or “mrs” at home, you will address them with “Sie” in Germany/Austria/Switzerland. If you would address them by their first names instead, you will use the “Du”. >>
That’s actually a little simplistic, if you’re talking about American English-speakers. In the U.S., almost everyone is on a first name basis, immediately. The number of times that you would address someone as “Mr” or “Mrs” are very rare and limited… certainly compared to the use of first names in Germany.
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