Please try again later. Kindle Edition Verified Purchase.
Buy for others
Helps to understand books about the area. Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon Giveaway. Set up a giveaway. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Learn more about Amazon Prime. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping. Not Enabled Word Wise: Enabled Amazon Best Sellers Rank: Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers.
Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally. Amazon Inspire Digital Educational Resources. Amazon Rapids Fun stories for kids on the go. In modern standard English, you as second person pronoun serves a multitude of purposes: Centuries ago the language had singular thou and thee , plural ye and you.
The numerical distinction then changed to one of register: Gradually ye and you shifted to the default position, supplanting thou and thee , which were marginalised to regional, religious, and archaic use. Then ye began to wane, for a variety of reasons, until you had taken centre stage as the pronoun of choice in singular and plural uses in all registers — but not all dialects. Hiberno-English is one dialect where ye is found: I grew up using it in the west of Ireland, and I find it extremely useful. Ye behaves much like you: One reason there are so many is that the vowel is often unstressed and thus orthographically opaque.
It helps to think of these in two main sets: As regards the verbal forms, there is evidence that in the 17th and 18th centuries some people tried to distinguish between singular and plural by making changes in the verb: Here it is in use:. Would it be too much to ask what yiz were up to?
28 sayings that you will only understand if you're from Northern Ireland
Did ye practise yere piano pieces? When she left, Malachy kept saying, Will ye mind yeerselves, will ye? Evicting youse is pure wrong. Dialects that exclude ye as a normal pronoun still retain it in several niches: The spread of you to dominate the pronominal paradigm in English simplified things, but at the cost of nuance and occasionally clarity.
28 sayings that you will only understand if you're from Northern Ireland - Mirror Online
I asked on Twitter what second-person plural pronouns people used and their dialect. All the replies can be read here.
This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, at You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site. I asked her if that was standard for people her age in her part of the US, and she said yes. I wonder why the youse spelling is so common. Only later did yous occur to me as a more sensible form. But apparently I used to. It seems they probably did, Tim.
Youse is common in vernacular varieties in the Northeast, particularly in large cities such as New York and Boston, and is also common in Irish English. You-uns is found in western Pennsylvania and in the Appalachians and probably reflects the Scotch-Irish roots of many settlers to these regions. You guys and youse appear to be newer innovations than the other dialectal forms of plural you.
I thought immediately of the King James version of the Bible with its use of Elizabethan English, the speech of U. Spoken American English reveals these variants more than written English, according to my experience.
Thanks for an interesting few minutes of reading about other countries and cultures. I like dialectal variants of any stripe, and for so fundamental a word as a pronoun they are especially noteworthy. As a child I assumed everyone said ye , until I learned how restricted it was geographically. US English, as you say, is blessed with an abundance of alternatives, but standardisation has kept them more at bay in the written language.
I feel like putting a red pen through it!! Yeah, I want to change it too!
1 customer review
Both of those options would read well. Not sure if I would be so forgiving to the sub editor though!! Guys is gender-neutral in some ways and for some people but not others. I wrote about this at Slate recently. And of course we have ye, youse, yiz and the like. But guys is holding its […].
- Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #81?
- Sarah’s Ten Fingers.
- Norn Iron Speek or Northern Irish Dictionary | Happy Domesticity;
In broad Cork and Kerry speech the initial y- is dropped from all second-person pronouns, giving singular oo oor oors, plural ee eer eers.