Arnold Zwicky's Blog

The One Big Happy in my comics feed today (released to newspapers on 9/4) shows Ruthie finding messages in the ABCs — the letters of the alphabet in their conventional order in modern English (A B C D E F G …):

friendly greeting H I  … descending to prohibitive N O

But wait! Go on a bit further and we get to T U, spelling a pronoun of friendly address in French (and sort of, in Spanish, too). Oh, you changeable ABCs, with your many moods!

So, in French:

2sg informal tu /ty/ vs. formal vous /vu/ (vous is also the 2pl pronoun)

And in Spanish:

2sg informal tú vs. formal usted (2pl: informal vosotros, formal ustedes)

On the deployment of the “informal” T vs. the “formal” V 2sg pronouns in these (and other) languages, there’s a gigantic literature, springing from

Roger Brown & Albert Gilman, “The pronouns of power and solidarity”, in Style in Language, ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok (1960)

This entry was posted on October 22, 2022 at 5:55 pm and is filed under Address terms, Linguistics in the comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.