Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy
bbc.com88 points by eigenspace 5 hours ago
88 points by eigenspace 5 hours ago
English used to have dual pronouns (what the article is a about), proper accusatives and genitives (she/her/hers, who/whom and the apostrophe-s genitive are survivors), formal/informal 2nd person pronouns (you / thou) and quite a few other things that come up when you learn French or Latin.
Yes/No and Yea/Nay used to mean different things too: "Is this correct?" could be answered "Yea, it is correct" whereas "Is this not a mistake?" could be answered "Yes, it is correct" (which you can also parse by taking the 'not' literally).
"Courts martial" and "secretaries general" are examples where the original noun-first word order remains.
My biggest side project is about grammatical gender in French, published as a research project on wikiversity[1].
It did made me go through many topics, like dual, exclusive/inclusive group person.
Still in a corner of my head, there is the idea to introduce some more pronouns to handle more subtilty about which first person we are expressing about[2]. The ego is not the present attention, nor they are that thing intertwined with the rest of the world without which nothing exists.
[1] https://fr.wikiversity.org/wiki/Recherche:Sur_l%E2%80%99exte...
[2] The project does provide an homogenized extended set of pronouns with 6 more than the two regular ones found in any primary school book. And completing all cases for all nouns is the biggest chunk that need to be completed, though it’s already done by now for the most frequent paradigms.
I found this article quite interesting, and couldn't help but feel there's something that's emotionally lost when we got rid of the dual-forms. The example from Wulf and Eadwacer where "uncer giedd" was translated to "the song of the two of us".
Somehow that just doesn't land the same.
We still have in English: us-two and you-two and we-two.
Same number of syllables.
Maybe “Song of just us two”
Like it’s common to hear “You two better stay out of trouble”
Or “it was us two in the apartment alone…”
Or “them two out there are pretty great ”
> Somehow that just doesn't land the same.
I fear that a modern colloquial rendering would disappoint yet further:
our besties tuneIf you found this interesting, you might want to check out The History of the English Language podcast.
I’m surprised how much I’m enjoying it. And I can’t believe I have 195 episodes left.
Interesting that in English we had special pronoun for plurals of exactly 2, but in Russian for instance they have special case declensions for plurals less than 5.
Is that significant? I have no idea. Is there a language with special case for exactly 2 with another case for a “few” and with yet another for “a lot”? Interesting to compare different cultures.
Boy that unc/uncer looks tantalisingly close to modern German uns/unser. Wiktionary seems to have it descending from a different PIE root, n̥s vs n̥h -- I'm not at all familiar with PIE though.
n̥ is just the "not" prefix. The "ero" is the real root. The prefix applies to the root first, and then the other pieces have their meanings, usually. (Its a reconstructed language. There are both exceptions and things we don't know.)
"n̥-s-ero-" is sort of < "not" next-is-plural "mine" >.
So, plural-(invert mine). Or roughly close to "we".
"n̥-h-ero-" is sort of < "not" next-is-inclusive-plural "mine" >.
So, plural-(group (invert mine)). Or roughly close to "us".
But both are pretty close to the same meaning. High German maintained a lot of PIE, and is very close in a lot of ways. Though... Welsh is closer.
That was my first thought too! So many things in old-english are very very close to modern German, so it's sometimes surprising to see these false-friends.
Contrary to what GP said, they're not false friends. They're a (lost) part of English's Germanic roots, shared with modern German.
Edit: Check out the Proto-Germanic personal pronouns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Proto-Germanic_person...
Oh, you mean “Falsche Freunde”?
I have no idea how to say that idiomatically in German, but it struck me that those are both “true” friends.
Also sad is the fact that “you” is now used for “thee” and “thou” and such. The older variants could distinguish between “you” plural and “you” singular
W'all have got y'all for plural you.
Before I moved to the South I (a non-Southerner) did not feel comfortable saying "y'all". But "you guys" seemed sexist. I have since spent a decade in the South and I have not picked up much of the dialect, but I definitely say "y'all" now.
"W'all" would be nice to have. I guess it's not a thing because it sounds too much like the things that separate rooms.
Have you yet progressed to y'all being singular and all y'all being plural?
No. As far as I can tell, singular "y'all", when it exists, is an implied plural. What you might hear as singular "y'all" is, say, when you go into a restaurant and say "do y'all have Coke?" to the server - that doesn't refer to just the server but to the restaurant as a whole. But I'm not a linguist and also I don't spend much time among people with heavier Southern dialect, so you shouldn't believe what I say.
You, y'all (small close group), y'all all (larger, further group), and "all y'all" — Southeast Texas (coastal) dialect form that showed up about 25 yrs ago. I suspect it might've been there all along, but only became acceptable at that point?
Another 100+ years, and this'll be some solid grammar.
Don’t forget you’uns or yinz!
I struggled with this when I was a school teacher. English lacks a good way to clarify you are addressing a group vs one person, which comes up a lot in a classroom. “Class, you…” is clunky, “You guys…” has obvious issues, and y’all or any other contraction is generally considered bad grammar. I generally went with y’all. Kids would laugh about it, but that seemed to help get their attention.
Surely, you knew all of your students' names and if you were addressing one person, you could've used their name. Addressing the class as merely "class" seems adequate as well. I'm having a hard time thinking of a situation where you are forced to use "you" ambiguously.
What if you're addressing part of the class, though? Like "y'all in the back, you need to get back to your work".
"You in the back" has the same level of specificity. Other options include (again) naming names or calling out a more specific location "You in the back row".
No, because "you in the back" could refer to just one person in the back, instead of several. So "y'all in the back" is more specific. (Of course names are an option in this context.)
That has to be more than 25 years
I grew up in Houston saying all that in the 80s
Forms of it persists in regional dialects, its not super common anymore but in Yorkshire I still here "dees" and "thas", "yous" also persist as another form of the plural you.
Arabic has dual subject pronouns. I wonder if the concept developed independently or if there was any influence somehow?
Arabic is on the Semitic branch of the hypothesised proto-Indo-European language, which has dual number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_(grammatical_number)
So you'd expect to see languages from western Europe to south Asia that either have the dual concept, or have an attested ancestor that did.
Within Indo-European languages, Irish has the concept of the dual. It's used with things that come in pairs like "mo dhá láimh" - my two hands.
Interestingly, to say one-handed you'd say "leath-lámh", where _leath_ means half, so half the <thing that's usually one of a pair>.
The Semitic language family is not part of the proto-indo-european language family. It's from the Afroasiatic family
You two add
You two commit
You two push
Vi/Vim are pronouns as well https://en.pronouns.page/vi/vim
Example usage: My editor is great. Vi expects you to say to vim `:q` and then vi closes vimself.
youtwo commit -m "Refactoring translations"
For anyone curious as me:
git means You two.
I wonder how it evolved into the modern British slang of “git”. To quote Wikipedia [0]
“modern British English slang, a git (/ɡɪt/) is a term of insult used to describe someone—usually a man—who is considered stupid, incompetent, annoying, unpleasant, or silly.“.
And “ Git is a popular open-source software for version control created by Linus Torvalds. Torvalds jokingly named it "git" after the slang term, later defining it as "the stupid content tracker".”
> Torvalds jokingly named it "git" after the slang term, later defining it as "the stupid content tracker".”
I think the better Torvalds quote was when he said "I name all my projects after myself"
There appears to be nothing linking Old English "git" with Modern English "git". Also, OEng "git" would've been pronounced more like "yit".
If you're interested in history of English, I'd highly recommend the History of English podcast. https://historyofenglishpodcast.com
Another fun pronoun distinction I have seen is having two forms of "we" - one including the person you are talking to, and one excluding them.
(To clarify this was in Hokkien, not Anglo-Saxon).
Like "us but not you"? That's mean.
Yeah it iw called the exclusive form lol.
But if you think about it seems normal... "we went to the city" is not really mean.