Yes/No and Yea/Nay used to mean different things too: "Is this correct?" could be answered "Yea, it is correct" whereas "Is this not a mistake?" could be answered "Yes, it is correct" (which you can also parse by taking the 'not' literally).

"Courts martial" and "secretaries general" are examples where the original noun-first word order remains.

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.

Another fun thing is that calling someone you don't know "thou" used to be an intentional insult ("you're not worthy of being called 'you'"), something that might be missed by a modern reader of Shakespeare or other EME texts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_and_no#The_Early_English_f...

Yes contradicts the negative question. So "Is this not a mistake?" should be contradicted with "yes, it is a mistake" or affirmed with "no, it is not a mistake".

It's further confusing because we have the idiom of suggesting things politely in a tentative manner such as isn't this a mistake? which has lost its sense of negativity and has come to mean "this is a mistake, I think," as opposed to being parsed literally to mean "this is not-a-mistake, I think".

I find myself wrong all the time, and I'm glad for the lesson!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_(pronoun)

So maybe we should bring back it, or ignore Chaucer as an authority.

It did made me go through many topics, like dual, exclusive/inclusive group person.

Still in a corner of my head, there is the idea to introduce some more pronouns to handle more subtilty about which first person we are expressing about[2]. The ego is not the present attention, nor they are that thing intertwined with the rest of the world without which nothing exists.

[1] https://fr.wikiversity.org/wiki/Recherche:Sur_l%E2%80%99exte...

[2] The project does provide an homogenized extended set of pronouns with 6 more than the two regular ones found in any primary school book. And completing all cases for all nouns is the biggest chunk that need to be completed, though it’s already done by now for the most frequent paradigms.

Somehow that just doesn't land the same.

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

    our besties tune

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

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 ”

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

"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.

Edit: Check out the Proto-Germanic personal pronouns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Proto-Germanic_person...

I have no idea how to say that idiomatically in German, but it struck me that those are both “true” friends.

"W'all" would be nice to have. I guess it's not a thing because it sounds too much like the things that separate rooms.

I do prefer "y'all", though. I think it's the best one we've got, of the options ("yous" being another big one, and ew, gross)

I also love the nuance of "y'all" and "all y'all".

That's something those western southerners told me. I don't know if a linguist would agree, but that seems to be the understanding of some actual language users...

All I know is that there is a second boundary somewhere through TX, NM, and AZ, because I've never met a native Californian who would say "y'all" non ironically.

When southern people say y'all to one person, they're really addressing you and your family (even though you might be the only one there.) If I ask "how y'all doing?" I want to know how you and yours are doing.

I just want people to stop asking me how I'm doing if they don't care.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that "How's it going" is a greeting, not an interrogative, and I want that change undone forever.

I just use "Howdy".

Another 100+ years, and this'll be some solid grammar.

I struggled with this when I was a school teacher. English lacks a good way to clarify you are addressing a group vs one person, which comes up a lot in a classroom. “Class, you…” is clunky, “You guys…” has obvious issues, and y’all or any other contraction is generally considered bad grammar. I generally went with y’all. Kids would laugh about it, but that seemed to help get their attention.

Yes, this is a case where you aren't forced to use "you" ambiguously in that context.

No, because "you in the back" could refer to just one person in the back, instead of several.

If you meant to address one person, you'd have said that one person's name, instead of voluntarily introducing ambiguity to the situation. Context & body language also makes this obvious. If you meant one person, you'd be making eye contact with one person instead of a group of people, etc. Students also know if they're paying attention or not. "The back" is not a specific area.

I grew up in Houston saying all that in the 80s

Is that significant? I have no idea. Is there a language with special case for exactly 2 with another case for a “few” and with yet another for “a lot”? Interesting to compare different cultures.

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

You two commit

You two push

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroasiatic_languages

Interestingly, to say one-handed you'd say "leath-lámh", where _leath_ means half, so half the <thing that's usually one of a pair>.

git means You two.

“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)

I think the better Torvalds quote was when he said "I name all my projects after myself"

"Git should get a room!"

(To clarify this was in Hokkien, not Anglo-Saxon).

But if you think about it seems normal... "we went to the city" is not really mean.