I don't have any idea what the Chinese equivalent would be. They do have a formal you (您), but it's so rarely used that I've never heard any terminology associated with pronoun use. I suppose I could simply leave that line blank.
Has the formal you become part of people's natural language? ISTR reading that it was, at least in origin, "translationese" (like kare in Japanese) and rather artificial.
I don't know much about its origins beyond the fact that it's a contraction of 你們 nǐmen, clearly paralleled by 俺 ǎn from 我們 wǒmen and 怹 tān from 他們 tāmen (neither of which have an equivalent in most European languages). 俺 is only used as a dialectal form of 我, but 怹 is still a polite pronoun, albeit even more limited in use than 您.
Nº 3
For a WotD, how about tutear?
Chuck
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