Ever since grade school, I've always wondered why the second person singular, "You" is the same as the second person plural, "You". I feel that this is a weakness in the English language, as it can create confusion. If I were addressing a group and said, "I need you to come with me." ,the people in the group would not know if I was addressing just one of them, or the whole group. I would have to use a hand gesture to point to an individual or a waving motion to indicate I was talking to the group. In the southern part of the US, we added the word "all" to the end of the "you" to indicate that is was plural. It eventually became the word "y'all". Other areas say "You guys" or "Yous guys". Is there any reason for this in the English language? What do you use as the second person plural pronoun? (Fraggle, if my terminology is wrong, please feel free to edit.)
No, your terminology is correct and your point is well taken.
This topic has come up several times. This is by no means unique to English. In fact it's an extremely common phenomenon in the Indo-European languages for people to strive for ever-more formal and polite ways to say "you." It's even happened in Chinese, although you don't hear it much since the egalitarian Communists took over.
The first step is usually to co-opt the plural pronoun for singular. French
vous, Swedish
ni, Russian
vy... and English "you." (Strangely, we took the accusative form instead of the nominative "ye.") Those other languages retain the singular pronoun,
tu, du, ty, but English "thou" has been abandoned except in the liturgy and the Quaker dialect. (And strangely, the Quakers use the accusative "thee," there must be some consistent force at work here that I haven't seen explained.)
This occasionally happens in the first person and it's called "nosism," from Latin
nos, "we." The editorial we, the royal we, the papal we. I don't know of a term for it when it happens in the second person.
In some countries, people eventually begin to feel uncomfortable with their new "formal" second-person singular pronoun and they search for something more formal than that. A common escalation is "your grace," which has been used in English.
From this point, just about anything can happen. Spaniards got frustrated with the mouthful
vuestra merced and condensed it into
usted. At least it has a durable plural form,
ustedes, "your graces."
Italians use
Lei, which means "she," but is also "it" since there is no neuter gender in Italian, and (I'm on shaky ground here) I think they're referring to "your grace" as "it." Germans do something even more bizarre and use
Sie, which means "they." In both languages the original second-person plural pronoun,
voi or
ihr, still exists but only in the liturgy. (But in Yiddish
ihr is still used for both plural and polite singular.)
The Portuguese get the prize though. Like Spanish,
vossa mercê was contracted to
você (complete with the plural form
vocês)... but they kept running with it and the phenomenon went through yet another iteration.
Você and
vocês are now used as familiar pronouns in many dialects. The new formal second-person pronoun in Portuguese is
o senhor, a senhora, or
a senhorita, "the gentleman" or "the lady."
In English we do indeed feel the need for a distinction between singular and plural. Dialect or slang forms like "y'all," "you 'uns," " 'mongst ye" and "you guys" have been coined to fill the void.
