Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy
65 points by eigenspace 4 hours ago | 30 comments

psychoslave 2 hours ago
My biggest side project is about grammatical gender in French, published as a research project on wikiversity[1].

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.

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sieste 10 minutes ago
Vi/Vim are pronouns as well https://en.pronouns.page/vi/vim

Example usage: My editor is great. Vi expects you to say to vim `:q` and then vi closes vimself.

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eigenspace 2 hours ago
I found this article quite interesting, and couldn't help but feel there's something that's emotionally lost when we got rid of the dual-forms. The example from Wulf and Eadwacer where "uncer giedd" was translated to "the song of the two of us".

Somehow that just doesn't land the same.

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heresie-dabord 2 hours ago
> Somehow that just doesn't land the same.

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

    our besties tune
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zukzuk 2 hours ago
If you found this interesting, you might want to check out The History of the English Language podcast.

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

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LAC-Tech 50 minutes ago
If you are interested in Wulf and Eadwacer it is beautifully sung here:

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

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frogulis 3 hours ago
Boy that unc/uncer looks tantalisingly close to modern German uns/unser. Wiktionary seems to have it descending from a different PIE root, n̥s vs n̥h -- I'm not at all familiar with PIE though.
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shakna 3 hours ago
n̥ is just the "not" prefix. The "ero" is the real root. The prefix applies to the root first, and then the other pieces have their meanings, usually. (Its a reconstructed language. There are both exceptions and things we don't know.)

"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.

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z500 17 minutes ago
I've never heard of it being based on that root before. Do you have a source?
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eigenspace 3 hours ago
That was my first thought too! So many things in old-english are very very close to modern German, so it's sometimes surprising to see these false-friends.
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huijzer 3 hours ago
Also sad is the fact that “you” is now used for “thee” and “thou” and such. The older variants could distinguish between “you” plural and “you” singular
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ksherlock 2 hours ago
W'all have got y'all for plural you.
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thechao 2 hours ago
You, y'all (small close group), y'all all (larger, further group), and "all y'all" — Southeast Texas (coastal) dialect form that showed up about 25 yrs ago. I suspect it might've been there all along, but only became acceptable at that point?

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

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gibspaulding 26 minutes ago
Don’t forget you’uns or yinz!

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.

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dfxm12 2 minutes ago
Surely, you knew all of your students' names and if you were addressing one person, you could've used their name. Addressing the class as merely "class" seems adequate as well. I'm having a hard time thinking of a situation where you are forced to use "you" ambiguously.
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AndrewKemendo 18 minutes ago
That has to be more than 25 years

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

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EvsCB 58 minutes ago
Forms of it persists in regional dialects, its not super common anymore but in Yorkshire I still here "dees" and "thas", "yous" also persist as another form of the plural you.
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nhgiang 3 hours ago
You two add

You two commit

You two push

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u2git 55 minutes ago
u2 add u2 commit u2 push
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postepowanieadm 40 minutes ago
Us3
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mohsen1 52 minutes ago
If you're interested in history of English, I'd highly recommend the History of English podcast. https://historyofenglishpodcast.com
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markus_zhang 3 hours ago
For anyone curious as me:

git means You two.

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stoneman24 3 hours ago
I wonder how it evolved into the modern British slang of “git”. To quote Wikipedia [0]

“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)

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Octoth0rpe 2 hours ago
> Torvalds jokingly named it "git" after the slang term, later defining it as "the stupid content tracker".”

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

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talideon 3 hours ago
There appears to be nothing linking Old English "git" with Modern English "git". Also, OEng "git" would've been pronounced more like "yit".
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vintermann 3 hours ago
"Listen baby, they're playing uncer song..."

"Git should get a room!"

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rbonvall 2 hours ago
Of course. It's distributed.
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LAC-Tech 53 minutes ago
Another fun pronoun distinction I have seen is having two forms of "we" - one including the person you are talking to, and one excluding them.

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

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postepowanieadm 37 minutes ago
Like "us but not you"? That's mean.
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LAC-Tech 18 minutes ago
Yeah it iw called the exclusive form lol.

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

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