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I thought courts martial and secretaries general (and Knights Templar/Hospitaller, et al) were Anglo-Norman/French borrowings. Do you have any examples of native English phrases following that pattern?

The formal/informal second person thing is fascinating to me as a Portuguese speaker.

European Portuguese, like many (most?) Romance languages, has the informal/formal second person split. Brazilian Portuguese has dropped the informal second person (tu) and uses only the formal second person (você).

Now, because “thou” is archaic, it sounds overly stiff, and most English speakers assume it was the formal second person, but it was actually the informal form. So both Brazilian Portuguese and English underwent the same process and chose the same way.

This sucks because yes its a mistake or no its not a mistake both fit

And we’ve literally born witness to yet another step in the trend of diluting our corpus of pronouns. The trend is very clearly from more articulate to less.

“They” and “their” for my whole lifetime were plurals. Now we’ve pretty much lost the mere clarity of knowing if the pronoun means 1 person or more than 1 person. Was watching “Adolescence” and the police mentioned “they” in regards to the victim of a crime. I was mistakenly under the impression that there weee multiple victims for much of the episode.

I’m very clearly slow to adapt to the new definitions.

> Somehow that just doesn't land the same.

I fear that a modern colloquial rendering would disappoint yet further:

    our besties tune

We still have in English: us-two and you-two and we-two.

Same number of syllables.

Maybe “Song of just us two”

Like it’s common to hear “You two better stay out of trouble”

Or “it was us two in the apartment alone…”

Or “them two are pretty good together ”

If you found this interesting, you might want to check out The History of the English Language podcast.

I’m surprised how much I’m enjoying it. And I can’t believe I have 195 episodes left.

The Wannadies had to go with "You & Me Song" https://youtu.be/t_e_45Szprk?si=4JVZHZzguqm3SFHN

If you are interested in Wulf and Eadwacer it is beautifully sung here:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6-QagSE7sFY

As a born German, now more native English speaker (left at 8), I agree. But, unless I'm very wrong, uns/unser in modern German is not restricted to 2 people either - it can mean 2 or more, as in "unsere Gemeinde" (our church, referring to something shared by hundreds of people)?

n̥ is just the "not" prefix. The "ero" is the real root. The prefix applies to the root first, and then the other pieces have their meanings, usually. (Its a reconstructed language. There are both exceptions and things we don't know.)

"n̥-s-ero-" is sort of < "not" next-is-plural "mine" >.

So, plural-(invert mine). Or roughly close to "we".

"n̥-h-ero-" is sort of < "not" next-is-inclusive-plural "mine" >.

So, plural-(group (invert mine)). Or roughly close to "us".

But both are pretty close to the same meaning. High German maintained a lot of PIE, and is very close in a lot of ways. Though... Welsh is closer.

That was my first thought too! So many things in old-english are very very close to modern German, so it's sometimes surprising to see these false-friends.

Same with Ic - Ich

There are still some remnants of this in Serbian and Croatian, e.g. the semi-dual "nas dvoje / nas dva".

W'all have got y'all for plural you.

Forms of it persists in regional dialects, its not super common anymore but in Yorkshire I still here "dees" and "thas", "yous" also persist as another form of the plural you.

Whereas modern English only distinguishes grammatical number by singular/plural (and Old English had dual), some languages even have trial (three).

Russian distinguishes paucal (few) from plural (many). It’s not super common but there are some other languages that do it.

It’s not just 5, it’s also 21 to 25, 31 to 35 etc. However, some Slavic languages (e.g. Slovak and Czech) don’t do that, and only have those special numerals for under 5.

u2 add u2 commit u2 push

Arabic is on the Semitic branch of the hypothesised proto-Indo-European language, which has dual number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_(grammatical_number)

So you'd expect to see languages from western Europe to south Asia that either have the dual concept, or have an attested ancestor that did.

I wonder how it evolved into the modern British slang of “git”. To quote Wikipedia [0]

“modern British English slang, a git (/ɡɪt/) is a term of insult used to describe someone—usually a man—who is considered stupid, incompetent, annoying, unpleasant, or silly.“.

And “ Git is a popular open-source software for version control created by Linus Torvalds. Torvalds jokingly named it "git" after the slang term, later defining it as "the stupid content tracker".”

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(slang)

"Listen baby, they're playing uncer song..."

"Git should get a room!"

Of course. It's distributed.

Pair programming are wit?

Like "us but not you"? That's mean.