Who's left on first?

[muckefuck]

I've known for a while now that second-person verb forms are basically obsolete in Brazilian Portuguese. Tu may show up in poetry, but in daily speech it's as archaic as thou in English. This isn't too surprising; some South American varieties of Spanish are reportedly headed the same way, with Usted being used even to young children. (Vosotros forms, by and large, are already obsolete in Latin America, although variants of them persist in voseo countries like Chile and Argentina.)

What I didn't know until recently was that a gente (lit. "the people"), which takes third-person singular agreement, has displaced first-person plural pronouns in some Brazilian varieties. Again, there are parallels elsewhere, like on in Modern French. However, this is the first language I know of which has both tendencies simultaneously.

It's fun to speculate what could happen next: Imagine some humble phrase (the equivalent of "yours truly" or "this body") taking over for the first-person singular pronoun. It would also take third-person agreement, collapsing the six personal forms typical of Romance to but two. The distinction between these couldn't even be characterised as "singular" vs. "plural", since the semantically plural (not to mention collective) a gente would take a historically singular form.

Comments

[strongaxe.livejournal.com]

Is there any evidence of other forms replacing obsolescent forms?

For example, in English, the first person singular form "you" has disappeared, making "you" ambiguous - so in some areas like the American south, they disambiguated this by making "you" always singular, and "you all" (or "y'all") plural.

And the same thing happened again, making "you" obsolescent, so "y'all" was used as both singular and plural - so they once again disambiguated this by making "y'all" always singular, and "all y'all" always plural. Sigh. :)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Something like that happened in Romance languages: Descendents of Latin vos came to be used for polite singular address (cf. French vous). In many varieties, an unambiguously plural form was created with the addition of a reflex of Latin alter "other", e.g. Sp. vosotros, Cat. vosaltres, Fr. vous autres. In Iberian varieties, the spread of polite forms based on a third-person expression meaning "your mercy" (Pt. você, Sp. Usted, Cat. vostè) marginalised vos; in Spanish, it survives as a familiar form in some regional varieties and vós has a shaky existence as an alternative polite pronoun in Catalan. (One native speaker describe the use of it as "sounding like talking to an archbishop".) It also lingers in the fossilised expression si us plau "(if you) please". I'm not sure if it's left any trace in European Portuguese, but it's vanished completely from the vernaculars of Brazil.

There's also a parallel in Dutch (jullie "y'all"), but I don't know the particulars.

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

I mock people who say "all y'all," unless it's Da yelling, "Fuck y'all! Fuck all y'all!"

That gets a pass.

[wiped.livejournal.com]

costarriqueños also do not tutear; vos and usted are both commonplace, with vos serving the role that tú does in other countries. guatemala is similar, in fact i think much of central (rather than south) america speaks this way. and while vosotros is rare as you said, vos is used in more latin american countries than not.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

I've loved "a gente" ever since I was first confused by it. I've even heard it used as first person singular - "dar p'ra gente" = "give me" (overheard in Rio)... although this may be far from standard usage: in the same conversation I heard "o rei" used generically (I think) for "him."