“Now how many of y’all think BoBo gonna try to convince us that polls don’t matter… of course unless they are trash for Biden & great for Trump!”
Who speaks like this?
“Now how many of y’all think BoBo gonna try to convince us that polls don’t matter… of course unless they are trash for Biden & great for Trump!”
Who speaks like this?
It’s actually a significant flaw in English that there’s no generally accepted 2nd person plural pronoun. There’s probably another language in the same boat but I’m not aware of one personally.
Currently in the running are:
For anyone who speaks a language other than English the missing pronoun is a pretty glaring thing.
Let’s not forget “yinz”
No, let’s forget yinz.
You shut your whore mouth.
My wife and I have been learning more German and it has ‘euch’ which is analogous to y’all. It took me a while to get that one worked out because it’s baked into the language instead of being a kind of slang hack for what English is missing.
One thing I see a lot with language charts is they’ll translate it as “you” or if you’re lucky “you (plural)”, which can be really confusing. I actually had one teacher that just straight up translated it as “y’all”, which was both funny and enlightening.
Funny that such a trivial word gave y’all such a fight.
Ich wünsche euch alles Gute auf eurem weiteren Weg zum Meistern der deutschen Sprache 💖
There’s also “you guys” if you use “guys” as gender-neutral, since there’s no particularly good feminine version of “guys”. There’s just “gals”, which sounds incredibly old fashioned, or “girls”, which sounds totally condescending when talking about adult women, or maybe “ladies”.
Then there’s this… Used to live in Florence so Y’all is pretty normal around there
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Y'all_Water_Tower
Ireland uses ‘ye’. There are multiple Hibernian English phrases or words that are just direct translations from Irish, which has second person plural, although the grammatical structure is different.
In Dublin, they often use ‘youse’, but it’s more slang than accepted. Ye is still seen as not entirely correct but is commonplace enough in everyday speech to be more than slang.
English is a terrible language, and I say that as a native speaker.
It’s a language from an isolated island that only the lower class spoke for centuries. For generations English royalty didn’t even speak English.
So the commoners just did whatever they wanted with it.
It why we use English words for livestock, but when someone eats it, we use French.
The people who could speak English were the ones raising the animals, not eating them.
This is amusing but I’m not sure it’s accurate. Even in French (or other Latin languages) the words differ.
Vache = Boeuf
Cochon = Porc
Poule = Poulet (as in English, chicken is the same)
There is an element of truth to what he said, but of course the reality is a lot more complicated. Generally the more low class and common a word is, the more likely it is to derive from Germanic, while the “fancier” a word is the more likely to come from French or some other language. E.G. mother and father derive from Proto-Germanic, while a word like mayor is derived from Latin by way of Old French.
English is still an absolute trainwreck of a language though. It’s a thousand years of just kind of winging it in terms of grammar and vocabulary. It started as essentially a creole and then outlived both the languages it spawned from as well as just absorbing whatever random words and languages it bumped into along the way.
Most other languages at least went through an overhaul or two along the way to clean up their worst eccentricities, but any attempts at “fixing” English over the years have been partial attempts at best and mostly just made things worse. In particular the current state of spelling in English is just the absolute worst with nearly all the rules being utterly arbitrary and just kind of randomly slapped together over the years.
I hear y’all in the north east a lot. You’s primarily comes from white ppl