thee, thou, thy and thine
After I'd studied "y'all" for a while I turned my attention to thee, thou, thy and thine. Most people have at least a basic background on them. They used to be informal ways of addressing people, used for friends and equals, similar to German "du" and Spanish "tu". Then Quakers mucked everything up by calling everyone by thee, thou, etc. and refusing to grant preferred status to the higher-ups, like tax collectors and royalty. THEN to avoid sounding like Quakers, English speaking society decided to just call
everyone you etc., without regard to status. So what happened to thee, thou, thy and thine? Several things. First, they went out of common use; they were common in certain Quaker areas and Quaker communities for a while, and in some British dialects, such as Yorkshire and near Lancashire, but they have begun to fade, even there, recently.
Now this story gets interesting in several ways. First is, what little usage they have today, could basically be called "put-on religious" or "put-on Quaker." If you want to sound old, or hopelessly out of date, or rigid or moralistic in the sense that people see old Quakers, you might want to use them. People generally have lost track of the grammatical difference between "thee" and "thou" so they might use "thee" in subject position, or less frequently, "thou" in object position, incorrectly. They don't have a very clear sense of their grammatical sense, except possibly in the places where they were really used daily.
Then, I asked the Quakers what they thought of so-called "plain speaking"...how could it be that, if it's called plain speaking, it's really only used in a "put on" way? Quakers are by nature opposed to pretentiousness, thus they shun such things as creating an in-group, putting on airs of any kind, or trying to "sound" as if they were something they're not. So, are these words doomed? Yes, in the Quaker community anyway. If they sound put-on, Quakers aren't going to use them. Period.
Such it is that the opposite has evolved from what was, at one time, "plain speaking." If it is no longer plain, it is on its way out, and if any group
chooses to start using it on a day-to-day basis, to create an ingroup, religious or not, or for any other reason, I'd like to know. It's a system, and, without wanting exactly to go back to the days of King James, I really would like to know how it sounds in an everyday kind of way.
Labels: dialects, grammar, y'all
keep calm y'all
I have a couple of grad. assistants working for me who teach often. Today I said to them, I have a bone to pick with y'all. As I watch you, I've noticed that you use "y'all" sometimes to address the class. But other times you use "you guys". And you NEVER use "you" to refer to the class. What's up with that?
They admitted, they were avoiding "you". You grow up in Texas schools, they said, if a teacher addresses the class as "y'all", everything's fine. If the principal addresses the class as "y'all", everything is fine. If anyone uses "you" everything is NOT FINE.
So they are avoiding it at all costs. It sounds rude, short, uncaring, harsh.
Now they are well aware of the problems of "y'all" sounding hick, sounding southern, being too informal, etc. They are also well aware of the problem I told them, that even we northerners were beginning to give up on "you guys" because it only referred to half the class at any given time, and the other half was bound to be offended.
But in the north, "you" as plural is not really marked one way or the other. It's not rude, it's not formal, it's not really a problem, using it with a class, using it with friends, using it with anyone. The only problem with it is that it isn't really
clear; it can refer to one person or many.
They have many ways to refer to one or many down here. "Y'all" can be used for one or many, but is used for one mostly when you don't know that one, or it is an older person, or you have to assume that the person has family or people around that you don't know about. Waitresses use "y'all" for singular; they're allowed. They have to be polite to everyone. They don't have time to sit and decide whether you are one or many. "Y'all" in that context generally refers to "you and yours" and is remarkably similar to some other languages that essentially use you-plural in polite situations. So in fact "y'all" can and does act as both singular and plural in all
kinds of situations, making it as ambiguous, in number (sometimes), as "you" is up north.
But one teacher pointed out something else. There is actually a "clipped y'all" which sounds more like "yaw" or "yuh". It's singular "y'all". Even though there is a
plural y'all, all-a-y'all, it's actually a quite complicated situation, and it has more to do with politeness, which always matters, than true number, which is a fluid concept (since not knowing whether someone has family, is the same as assuming that they do, and you just don't know it). We northerners shake our heads at the concept that "it's not about number."
About this "yaw" or "yuh" - I
have heard it. I'll keep my ears out for it again. There aren't so many people you can even
ask, as they aren't always all that aware of how they speak or why; they misreport, or give questionable data. Doesn't matter. If you live here a while, I figure, you get the hang of it. People are friendly. They like to talk.
So I told them, well, there's always "you folks" or "you lot" - I doubt they're going to go with the Pittsburgh "you'ns" or the bronx "youse" which I once, by the way, heard in Alton, IL. These are similarly marked. There's a whole lot of us who have trouble with all the options. Now that I'm Texan, I'll start having trouble with "you", because I'll begin to hear it the way they hear it - too formal, too rude. One doesn't want people thinking one doesn't care.
Labels: grammar, languages, ttu, y'all
annals of y'all, continued
There is no question that we northerners hear singular "y'all" often down here in West Texas. A couple of examples will help. First, and this one is common: I'm standing alone at the schoolhouse entrance waiting for my children and a school official says to me, "How are y'all?" The answer is clear:
We're fine, because she was clearly referring to me and mine, all of us, even though only I was present. OK, I have no problem with that. Second, I'm in a restaurant with a 7-year-old, and the waitress says, "Do y'all want some coffee," and I say
yes, I do in order to emphasize that it's just me that wants the coffee, no thanks for the seven-year-old. I'm ok with this too: I'm still a stranger, she doesn't know if I have family, she'd rather assume lots of possibilities than assume I'm alone in this world. But the second time around, she says "Do y'all want cream with that?" and now, I feel like I've already
told her I'm alone, she
knows the seven-year-old doesn't want cream, etc.
In the lab yesterday morning I found the quote where there's nothing more likely to start another Civil War than a notherner telling a southerner that they use y'all singular. When I found that I pressed "print" and should have known that 37 pages would print out before it was over. The passage was interesting though, not least for its comments, in which people weighed in on other you plurals (my favorite "you'ns" as well as "youse") and their distributions. But it gave several interesting reasons worth chewing over that we hear so much of this. One is that since "y'all" is a mark of southerness, a northerner is more likely to hear it in
any context as if to say, I'm southern, and we're in the south, and this is how we reach out to you. Another is that it's a mark of familiarity; one of its functions is to reach out and be friendly and polite; in that context it could be said that politeness and hospitality are clearly more pressing than details like singular/plural (this alone being a concept somewhat alien to northerners). So, it's not that y'all is singular, it's not, it's more that politeness trumps grammatical accuracy in some or many circumstances.
A fair swath of my class, maybe a third of about thirty people, said they only use "y'all" to
mean plural. The article bears out that educated southerners generally say this, believe it, and for all we know follow it (one point made was that they argue passionately about it, generally opposed to the possibility of singular y'all, yet the facts don't bear them out; apparently there are
plenty of people using singular y'all, for whatever reason, and these are very likely the same people). I have not heard
these particular students use singular y'all, in opposition to their expressly stated rule, though I've challenged them to listen carefully. I have found some who admit to using it freely singular
and plural, who interpreted it as singular/polite and used it for everybody, and some who aren't really sure.
Surprisingly, wait staff is a definite subculture for everyone. Waitresses and waiters have their own rules, because they deal with hundreds of people, have to be polite, and don't have time to worry about details of customers' personal lives. They talk about the "rhythm of working" and admit to using "y'all" much the same way as the waitress used it with me.
The author of the article pointed out other more serious problems with finding and tracking singular y'all, though: half the time we (even linguists who care passionately) don't really keep track of what we really say, and, the other half, we are in the role of hearer, or receiver, and don't really know what the speaker
meant; presumably, even if we could ask, they might not know whether they were primarily motivated by grammatical accuracy, politeness, intimacy, southern pride, or whatever. I suspect, and this is the bottom line, really, that this is a case of rules that are in opposition: one says y'all is plural, the other says, when in doubt, be polite, and allow for other unseen people in the picture where you might not be familiar with them (the unseen spouse, for example). When asked about the rule (y'all is plural), there's no question: y'all is plural. If asked in another way, the answer might be different.
I have to relate a good story; four rough northern men are in a North Carolina diner. The waitress says to one, "Y'all want cream in your coffee?" to which he says, "how do I know if you mean just me, or all of us, since you said 'y'all'?" To which she replies, "If I'd a meant 'all-of-y'all, I would have said 'all-of-y'all'. Now, do y'all want cream or not?"
Back to our point: if y'all were so clearly plural, what would the point be of even
having all-of-y'all?
On the national scene, I'd like to point out that
you guys of my home dialect is doomed, a victim of literalism that no longer allows referring to any mixed group of males/females with a male pronoun of any kind.
Youse and
you'ns are clearly marked as "hick" (or "working-class" which is a kind of bizarre euphemism for "lower class" or as my student called it, "white trash". She was intimating that it wasn't the geographical association of "youse" that bothered her so much though as a waitress herself she didn't really care that much for Jersey manners or food snobbery. She was saying, she wouldn't or couldn't use "youse" because of that class marking alone, but, to her relief, living here offered her the opportunity to use "y'all" which can be done much more freely among all classes and at all levels of society. Sure, we know it's not formal English. But, our phones seem to know we are in Texas, and, if we leave out the apostrophe, my phone at least will supply it, and even put it in the right place.
Liberman, M. (2009).
Singular y'all: a "devious Yankee rumor"? Language Log. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2009. Available 10-12.
Labels: dialects, grammar, language, linguistics, ttu, y'all
singular y'all
My class and I go back and forth a little about language; they're pretty much all from Texas, although I have one from Australia, and another from Italy, and a third from Albany NY which thank God lends me some credibility about Northernisms like "you guys." I ask them honestly what they mean by certain things and they usually tell me their true feelings.
So I said to them, I'm trying to figure out "y'all," and I really want to know how you feel and how you use it. I had introduced the topic once earlier when I said that when I typed "yall" into my phone my phone actually
added the apostrophe as if it was a standard word and everyone should know how to spell it right.
But today I had read something by Mencken, of all people, who said something to the effect that out of 100 times you might hear it to refer to someone who is alone (it's common, for example, for people to say, 'how are y'all?' to people who are alone), it can be interpreted as a polite, you and yours, as in, 'how are you and yours?' (now this interpretation is very much in fitting with our Latin, Spanish/French roots where referring to you in the plural is always more polite than referring to you in the singular). But the 100th time, Mencken says, it's just plain singular, no two ways about it. There's no possible "you and yours" interpretation that could go with it. So I said to my class, what's up with that? Can it really be truly singular? I'm well aware of "all of y'all" which is a definitive plural, emphasizes the inclusiveness of a group. And locals are quick to point out that, although y'all easily moves from singular to plural (same way 'you' does), all-a-y'all is
always plural.
No, says one, a student who I trust to think carefully and give a good answer. It's used in the singular, but it's polite, and it refers to the plural; its
meaning is plural.
So it occurred to me that one reason to account for the other 1%, is that some people
interpret the singular y'all is simply something you use for everyone, as a gesture of politeness; it's marked as polite, but not necessarily marked as plural. So there are a number of people around who go around calling everyone "y'all," not realizing that someone who didn't have a family might actually get offended.
And sure enough one woman said, after class, that she was a waitress, and was in the habit of calling everyone "y'all," when one day someone got offended; that person was overweight, and clearly alone in the world, or at least in the booth. And that customer assumed that "y'all" was a reference to his/her obesity, since there wasn't any other plural around.
Students were interested in what I had to say about "you'ns," "youse" and "you lot," other you plurals that are out there. In fact I have read a bit about them, but when it came to "y'all," I never quite understood the singular/plural controversy. Now, I'm surrounded by it (that, and "yes sir" and "yes ma'am" which I've reinterpreted as "polite"). I always tend toward polite and non-confrontational, as I explained to my students, so it's only a matter of time before I start in with some of this "y'all" and "all-a-y'all" as long as I can feel like I've figured it out well enough. We talked about other language changes: Ms., everyone and "their" book, etc. Some of my serious thinking about language and language change I'll put
here as I'm trying to corral my thinking about linguistics in general and put it in one place. But, at the same time, I'm learning another language. Fixin' to learn it, anyway!
Labels: dialects, grammar, language, linguistics, ttu, y'all
