Grammar silliness

[kengr]

I had an odd thought today.

Both "you" and "they" get rather slippery with regards to number. That is they can both be singular and plural.

As a side note, next time someone tries to get on your case about using they as a gender neutral pronoun, point out that it goers back to at least the 1400, and it wasn't until the latter half of the 1800s that grammarians started trying to discourage it in favor of using "he" in situations where gender was indeterminate. Which is not that acceptable nowadays.

And you gets interesting as well. Many dialects have have evolved phrases that indicate that a plural you is meant.

What triggered all this was a comment in one of fayanora's stories with members of a collective (multiple personalities) noting that they couldn't use "they" as a gender neutral pronoun because they used it to refer to the whole collective.

Since they were British, that caused me to free associate to the expression "you lot" which definitely refers to a group. That lead me to the stereotypical "youse" found in parts of the US east coast.

"You all" (also y'all") is rather more complicated and I'm not sure if it's properly used as a singular or plural. "all y'all" is definitely plural though. :-)

Anybody have any other examples?

Isn't grammar *fun*?

Comments

[elf]

"Y'all" is technically plural but does get used as singular, especially in stock phrases such as "Y'all come back later" or "Y'all are welcome to come inside."

IIRC, it's a matter of politeness, an implication of "I know there's only one of you, but in case I miscounted, I want everyone to know this applies ot them, too."

(I spent a portion of my teen years in the south. I remember being confused the first time I heard "y'all" to refer to a single person.)

[we_are_spc]

We've also heard that y'all refers to four or less (Y'all can fit in the same car) where all y'all refers to five or more (All y'all can't fit in this car.)

But I could be off there.

-Fallon~

[stickmaker]

It's "Ain't grammar *fun*?" ;-)

I spent the first twelve years of my life in southeastern Kentucky. It's a lie that the accent in the more isolated areas is Elizabethan (or whatever) but it is definitely a dialect grown largely in isolation. There's a lot of odd vowel pronunciation ("bike" often comes out as "back").

After spending most of my life in Central Kentucky - which has its own accent, and that is *not* the same as a Southern accent - I still occasionally have a bit of my childhood speech patterns come through.

As a child I definitely heard "You all" used, but until I moved I only heard it as a plural.

[we_are_spc]

That was in Arkansas, too. Knife was often "knahfe or "Knaff" I have that come through sometimes because I had family there and would fall into the speech patterns. My friend went to Belmont, and she talks a lot about some of the dialects in Tennessee, too.

(It helps that Isaiah is from Tenessee (if a different one) and he says he's surprised at how similar (Yet still a little different) the dialects are here to his own.

-Fallon~