this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2024
101 points (95.5% liked)
Asklemmy
43889 readers
855 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No, it is odd to use the singular imho. Of course it is not the polite form
Eg: https://www.reddit.com/r/france/comments/6ocn38/quelles_langues_%C3%A9trang%C3%A8res_parlez_vous/
Oh damn. It didn't even occur to me that we were talking plural here lol
Obviously you're right.
edit: I honestly hate the fact that English doesn't have a non-vernacular way to distinguish between singular and plural in the 2nd person. Makes it so much harder to get my head around this sort of situation. "What languages do yous speak?" Would make it so much easier!
That precisely how the Scots and the Irish would ask it, the yanks would say "y'all". It's just the English who are fucking weird :)
Yeah, sort of. I also use "yous" frequently as part of my dialect regularly. But it's certainly an informal usage that I would not normally use in written communication.
I actually suspect, though I haven't investigated it enough to be confident, that there may be something else going on. That there's possibly a difference—in my dialect, at least—between 2nd person plural "multiple specific people" and "a general large audience". And that "yous" might only be appropriate in the former.
Yeah, it is the hardest thing when learning a new language. When you learn a new concept that your language doesn’t use. For example, in Latin, German and Japanese, the grammatical case is very important but totally irrelevant in French and English. So I try when I speak French or English to think about the case. That way it comes more naturally to me when speaking German or Japanese.
Yeah, the catch here is that it's a feature that my native language does at least sort of have, just applied in a way that makes it not clear. When it's a feature I'm completely unfamiliar with, I'm more likely to be on guard for it, if I've learnt it. But here I didn't even think about it, because it was an element I am familiar with, so I never second-guessed my intuition, even though that intuition was wrong.
Not particularly odd, just less formal. Much less of an issue with recent generations especially. Younger millennials and later don’t seem to care nearly as much in a lot of contexts. Honestly, outside professional interactions, I see and hear the “tu” a whole lot.