Thursday, March 4, 2010

The History of "You"

So I have been looking over the past few days about the evolution of the second person pronoun in indo-european languages. It is very interesting, the list below is just a few languages and their second person singular pronoun.

Russian - ты /tɨ/
Ukrainian - ти /tɪ/
Polish - ty /tɨ/
Sanskrit - tvam /tvɑm/
Hindi - तुम /t̪um/
French - tu /tu/
Spanish - tú /tu/
Italian - tu /tu/
Portuguese - tu /tu/
Latin - tu /tu/
A. Greek - σύ /su/
M. Greek - εσύ /ɛ(e)su/
German - du /du/
Dutch - jij /jeɪ/
M. English - you /ju/
Md. English - thou /θɑʊ/
O. English - þū /θu/
Romanian - tu /tu/
Swedish - du /du/
Norwegian - du /du/
Albanian - ti /ti/
Irish - tú /tu/
Welsh - ti /ti/
Hittite - zik /zik/ (in other cases Acc. /tuk/)

Very interesting (at least i think).

Two people have constructed proto-indo-european pronoun chart (remember we do not know what they actually are, these are just probable answers)
Beekes: *tuH - nominative
Sihler: *tī̆ (*tū̆) - nominative

Just something to think about :)

Nathan

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