{"id":102952,"date":"2019-10-02T07:00:01","date_gmt":"2019-10-02T14:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=102952"},"modified":"2019-10-01T19:03:29","modified_gmt":"2019-10-02T02:03:29","slug":"20191002-01","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20191002-01\/?p=102952","title":{"rendered":"My summer vacation: Watching a German movie on the plane and learning some language history"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>One movie was <i>Der Vorname<\/i>, which was put in the &#8220;Comedy&#8221; category, but it&#8217;s a comedy like the Alan Alda movie <i>The Four Seasons<\/i> is a comedy. <i>I.e.<\/i>, not actually a comedy.<\/p>\n<p>I tried to redeem my bad choice by watching a German-dubbed <i>Shrek<\/i>. I noticed that Shrek and Princess Fiona address each other as <i>ihr<\/i>, which is the second-person familiar plural. Why is that?<\/p>\n<p>A colleague of mine explained that <i>ihr<\/i> is an archaic form of the second person pronoun. It&#8217;s used in fairy tales, so the movie uses it to capture the fairy-tale feeling.<\/p>\n<p>However, Shrek and Donkey address each other as <i>du<\/i> (second person informal), not <i>ihr<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>My colleague thought about it some more and realized that he had made a mistake. &#8220;<i>Ihr<\/i> is the archaic second person <i>formal<\/i>, corresponding to modern <i>Sie<\/i>. And as a general rule, nobody is formal with a donkey.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Trying to keep that part of my brain from disappearing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-102952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Trying to keep that part of my brain from disappearing.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102952\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}