On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 07:20:31PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> fenton@debian wrote:
> > By the same token, it should also have a second person plural,
> > which it lacks [...] much like a lot of the country uses
> > "y'all", or "you all" for those who don't want to sound
> > Southern, for a second person plural [...]
>
> *The* country? I've not noticed southern England using "y'all",
> but I'm not from there. ;-)
>
> I think Northampton dialect uses a second person plural which
> sounds like "orlvyeh" (might be "all of you"?) for cases
> when "you" is ambiguous. Like most English dialects, there's
> little written work and dictionaries are hard to get. I think
> developments often try to *reduce* complexity and ambiguity,
> but abuse of they increases ambiguity.
Touche (I *know* the e is accented, but I don't want to fight with my
not-very-good-at-UTF-8 input device to manage it). I stand duly chastized
for not paying enough attention to my choice of words there.
Mostly I find the concept of 'thou shall not sully the ancient tongue',
English-spoken-as-my-English-teacher-spoke-it rules silly. The roots of
the use of singular they can be traced back a *long* ways if you want to
get into the linguistics behind it, certainly a lot farther than what the
average person today would be able to recognize as "English" (or should
that be Anglish? How much of it is really Saxon? And so on...).
Oddly, this has some interesting ties to why "its" is a possessive
pronoun and "it's" is a contraction. :)
--
Joel Aelwyn <fenton@debian.org> ,''`.
: :' :
`. `'
`-
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