I’m addressing another individual and I say “You are special.”
Why don’t I say “You is special”?
I’m only talking to a singular person not a group of people. If I was talking about somebody else I would say “He is special” not “He are special”. If I was talking about myself I would say “I am special” not “I are special”.
Are is used for plurals, like “All of you are special” or “They are special” or “We are special”. But for some reason when we address a single individual in the second person, we switch to the plural form.
It’s complicated. English used to have a singular 2nd person (thou) and a plural 2nd person (you/ye). Thou became the singular used for intimates and inferiors; people used “you” on formal occasions to single persons (the “royal we” implied a royal “you”). The intimate form died out, leaving “you” to work as singular and plural - but it kept the original association with plural verb forms.
Sort of the same reason we say “I am” instead of “I is.” We have different forms of the verb “to be” for first, second, and third person. (We also say “thou art,” except that we don’t use “thou” much any more.)
I don’t know about other languages, but it’s the same way in German, at least.
Any individual human body contains more bacteria than human cells. Thus each of us is a plural. I are myriads. When you die totally (maybe flung naked into interstellar vacuum) those microbes don’t count because they’ve all popped. You is dead.
Another English feature is type checking. Computer languages assign data types; English doesn’t distinguish reality from fiction. Admiral Farragut and Captain Ahab are (or were) both 19th-century American seamen. “Are”, or “were”, or “is”, don’t tell us that one existed in reality and the other didn’t, not unless we add distinct qualifiers. English also doesn’t distinguish metaphors. “I’m dead!” may mean fatally wounded or just very tired.
It’s a sloppy language but the best we’ve got except maybe Loglan. Does Esperanto have puns?
But really, the issue here is that you are still IS plural, grammatically. Just because we use a plural form to refer to one person doesn’t mean that the grammar changes. (Also, you are sill could refer to more than one person.)
Grammar often is not strictly representational, and this is just one case. The problem here is thinking that grammar somehow is required to map onto things in the real world in some kind of exact way, and there is no obligation for it to do that. The internal consistency of grammar is just that: internal.
Again, I would just repeat what I said above: are isn’t “used for plurals.” Are simply is plural. Rather, what is happening is that plural grammar can be used to refer to one person. Just because it refers to one person doesn’t mean that it no longer is plural. “Plural” is a grammatical construct–not a quantity of people existing in the physical world.
(1) Verb conjugation, which is almost always irregular for analogues to the verb “to be” across Indo-European languages generally.
(2) The Danes, who first raided then settled in northern England in the 9th and 10th centuries, introduced “are” for the plural forms of the verb, i.e. “we”, plural “you”, and “they”. At a later point the singular “thou” was replaced by “you” as well. The modern Danish cognate to “are” is “er”, and IIRC the English words “am”, “are”, and “is” all translate to that one word “er”.
Another Danish word is “sky” which means “cloud cover” and was adopted into English to mean just sky, which should surprise nobody.
Does German really have more strong and/or irregular verbs than English, at least in common use? Some numbers would be helpful. A superficial glance at Wikipedia claims German has “more than 200 strong and irregular verbs” and English has “many irregular verbs, approaching 200 in normal use—and significantly more if prefixed forms are counted”. Sounds pretty much the same.
In Early Modern English (about 1400 to 1550), the verb “to be” was conjugated as follows (present tense followed by past tense):
First person singular: I am, I was
Second person singular: Thou art, thou wert
Third person singular: He/she/it is, he/she/it was
First person plural: We are, we were
Second person plural: Ye/you are, ye/you were
Third person plural: They are, they were
The following things have changed since then: “Ye”, which was used in slightly different circumstances than “you”, dropped out of use. Then “you” began to be used for both plural and singular second person. “Art” and “wert”, which were used with “thou”, also dropped out of use and were replaced with “are” and “were”.
Many verbs are irregular in both English and German (which makes sense, of course). Oddly enough, when I was a student of German, the verb we were taught as the canonical example of a regular verb was “machen” (to make) - which though regular in German, is irregular in English (make, made).
Check out this fascinating article about how language changes over time (bolding is mine)
" Human language is based on grammatical rules. Cultural evolution allows these rules to change over time. Rules compete with each other: as new rules rise to prominence, old ones die away. To quantify the dynamics of language evolution, we studied the regularization of English verbs over the past 1,200 years. Although an elaborate system of productive conjugations existed in English’s proto-Germanic ancestor, Modern English uses the dental suffix, ‘-ed’, to signify past tense6. Here we describe the emergence of this linguistic rule amidst the evolutionary decay of its exceptions, known to us as irregular verbs. We have generated a data set of verbs whose conjugations have been evolving for more than a millennium, tracking inflectional changes to 177 Old-English irregular verbs. Of these irregular verbs, 145 remained irregular in Middle English and 98 are still irregular today. We study how the rate of regularization depends on the frequency of word usage. The half-life of an irregular verb scales as the square root of its usage frequency: a verb that is 100 times less frequent regularizes 10 times as fast. Our study provides a quantitative analysis of the regularization process by which ancestral forms gradually yield to an emerging linguistic rule. "
“What will be the next irregular verb to regularize? It is likely to be wed/wed/wed. The frequency of ‘wed’ is only 4.2 uses per million verbs, ranking at the very bottom of the modern irregular verbs. Indeed, it is already being replaced in many contexts by wed/wedded/wedded. Now is your last chance to be a ‘newly wed’. The married couples of the future can only hope for ‘wedded’ bliss. In previous millennia, many rules vied for control of English language conjugation, and fossils of those rules remain to this day. Yet, from this primordial soup of conjugations, the dental suffix ‘-ed’
emerged triumphant. The competing rules are long dead, and unfamiliar even to well-educated native speakers. These rules disappeared because of the gradual erosion of their instances by a process that we call regularization. But regularity is not the default state of a language- a rule is the tombstone of a thousand exceptions.”
