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Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy

Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy

eigenspace

Comments (56)

  • red_admiral
    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.
  • psychoslave
    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.
  • eigenspace
    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.
  • frogulis
    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.
  • huijzer
    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
  • iterateoften
    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.
  • nhgiang
    You two addYou two commitYou two push
  • dataflow
    Arabic has dual subject pronouns. I wonder if the concept developed independently or if there was any influence somehow?
  • anon
    undefined
  • shrubby
    youtwo commit -m "Refactoring translations"
  • markus_zhang
    For anyone curious as me:git means You two.
  • mohsen1
    If you're interested in history of English, I'd highly recommend the History of English podcast. https://historyofenglishpodcast.com
  • LAC-Tech
    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).