What’s wrong with y’all? I know nothing is wrong with YOU, but what’s wrong with using the contraction y’all? Most English speakers consider y’all to be slang but there is a really good reason this word has gradually crept into standard English vernacular. Here’s a small grammar lesson to explain.
You is a pronoun and in English grammar it is used if you’re talking to an individual AND a group of people. So, the same word is used to reference both a singular individual or multiple people. As an example, I could say the phrase “How are you?” and it would be grammatically accurate regardless if I were talking to just you or to a crowd of people.
In the other Germanic and Latin languages, there are two seperate words used to address an individual and two or more people.
In German, it’s du and ihr.
In Spanish, it’s tú and vosotros
In Italian, it’s tu and voi
In Portuguese, it’s você and vocês.
In French, it’s tu and vous.
And in English, you and you?
So what happened? English is a germanic based language with heavy latin influence and somehow we took a sharp grammatical left turn somewhere and lost our plural form of you.
This is what happened. There once was a regularly used plural form of you in the English language. Ye was the word used to address three or more people. Think like “Hear Ye! Hear Ye!”
But during the mid-17th century, England, like the majority of Europe, was experiencing social, religious, and economic turmoil. There were major shifts in the rule of the monarchy and the role of the aristocracy. The same aristocracy who had insisted upon being referred to by formal pronouns.
As the English Revolution came to an end in the late 1650’s, the dissidents decided to level the pronoun playing field and drop the informal and group pronoun ye.
Some English speakers, like some found in Ireland, still use ye in their speech, but the rest of the English speaking world lost their plural you.
Which brings us to “y’all.”
Y’all is a contraction of you all, which means it’s used to address a group of people. It became a word in some English dialects as a way to fill the gap left by ye. Y’all evolved into a word independently in both the Southern United States and in Indian English speaking communities in South Africa.
Y’all is the easiest ye replacement because it’s one single syllable. In the mid-south of the United States, people say “you all” and in the western United States, people say “you guys.” And in some parts of the East coast, people say “yous guys.”
I recommend adding y’all into your speech when addressing a group of people. In my own experiments, I’ve observed that using a quick version of the plural you adds acknowledgement of every individual to whom I’m speaking.
Let me know in the comments which version of the plural “you” you use in your daily speech if any and where you learned to speak English. I also want to hear from you if you’re one of the few who has continued to use “ye.”[Kim Waite](www.nootrl.com)
[link] [comments]
from Тавтай морилогтун | Languagelearning http://bit.ly/2M4ZXk2
via Learn Online English Speaking
Comments
Post a Comment