My summer vacation: Watching a German movie on the plane and learning some language history
When I travel on an airplane, I like to watch movies in German because it gives me a chance to practice my aural decoding, which has always been a weak spot of mine.
One movie was Der Vorname, which was put in the “Comedy” category, but it’s a comedy like the Alan Alda movie The Four Seasons is a comedy. I.e., not actually a comedy.
I tried to redeem my bad choice by watching a German-dubbed Shrek. I noticed that Shrek and Princess Fiona address each other as ihr, which is the second-person familiar plural. Why is that?
A colleague of mine explained that ihr is an archaic form of the second person pronoun. It’s used in fairy tales, so the movie uses it to capture the fairy-tale feeling.
However, Shrek and Donkey address each other as du (second person informal), not ihr.
My colleague thought about it some more and realized that he had made a mistake. “Ihr is the archaic second person formal, corresponding to modern Sie. And as a general rule, nobody is formal with a donkey.”
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It’s the same in Spanish I think. When you read books about medieval times they all address peers as vos, rather than usted and reserve tu for subordinates.
There might be a connection with the “pluralis maiestatis”, or “royal plural”: Since the king or queen would refer to him- or herself as “wir” (“we”, first person, plural), it is only fitting to addess them with “ihr” (second person, plural). And @Victor Agababov, I think all the european languages inherited this custom from the romans. Even the english, although it doesn’t make much of a difference there, as second person is always “you”.
It’s called “T/V distinction” in linguistics, because it’s common for the pronouns to start with those letters, such as tu and vous in French. English has thou and related pronouns, although they too are archaic.
Ah, yes! I remember “thou” from reading Shakespeare in school (and playing Ultima games, of course)!
Thou hast lost an eighth!
Thou, thee, thy and thine were used a lot in opera and other literature at that time.