Feb. 5th, 2020 11:35 am
Two at a time
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muckefuckSo it's interesting to me what distinctions I find "natural" when speaking Hawai'ian. As mentioned before I think, I still find it difficult to remember to use the preposition i to mark direct objects and the distinction between a-possessives and o-possessives still eludes me. (It's not alienable vs inalienable and doesn't fall neatly into in other sort of categorisation.) But the VSO word order is so very familiar from the Celtic languages (I only stumble with negative sentences, where pronoun subjects behave differently to nouns), as is the structure of copulative sentences (almost identical to Irish).
One that surprised me is the dual. Before starting, I forgot about the existence of a dual category in the pronouns, as well as a clusivity distinction, so I couldn't grasp why Duolingo was glossing kāua as "you and I" rather than simply "we". Once the penny dropped, I realised how natural this distinction is to me, and even more so the distinction between "you", "you two", and "y'all".
Unlike some NAE-speakers, I don't have a mandatory "you" vs "y'all" distinction; it's very sensitive to register, with "y'all" sounding informal. The same is true to a lesser degree of "you two". It doesn't sound wrong to use "you" instead but I strongly prefer "you two" whenever I'm referring to just two people. This is probably because I know so many partnered folks and I always like to make it clear when I'm referring to just one of them and when I mean both.
It's interesting to think about how this carries into other languages. The other Indo-European languages I know all have a plurality distinction in the second person, but in those with a T-V distinction, this is further complicated. Cajun French, under influence of Southern American English, has developed vous-autres, but it sounds odd to me to say "Sie alle" in German. Same goes for "Sie zwei" but "Ihr zwei" rolls off the tongue. Irish even has relics of a dual, including the personal form beirt "two people", but I had to look up beirt againn just now, I use it so little.
One that surprised me is the dual. Before starting, I forgot about the existence of a dual category in the pronouns, as well as a clusivity distinction, so I couldn't grasp why Duolingo was glossing kāua as "you and I" rather than simply "we". Once the penny dropped, I realised how natural this distinction is to me, and even more so the distinction between "you", "you two", and "y'all".
Unlike some NAE-speakers, I don't have a mandatory "you" vs "y'all" distinction; it's very sensitive to register, with "y'all" sounding informal. The same is true to a lesser degree of "you two". It doesn't sound wrong to use "you" instead but I strongly prefer "you two" whenever I'm referring to just two people. This is probably because I know so many partnered folks and I always like to make it clear when I'm referring to just one of them and when I mean both.
It's interesting to think about how this carries into other languages. The other Indo-European languages I know all have a plurality distinction in the second person, but in those with a T-V distinction, this is further complicated. Cajun French, under influence of Southern American English, has developed vous-autres, but it sounds odd to me to say "Sie alle" in German. Same goes for "Sie zwei" but "Ihr zwei" rolls off the tongue. Irish even has relics of a dual, including the personal form beirt "two people", but I had to look up beirt againn just now, I use it so little.
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