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

[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.