Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2024 January 20

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

January 20

Usage of 'Du' in German

Recently I have come across the German form 'Du' on several occasions, which seems to be a more polite form of adressing a single person than lower-case 'du'. First in online advertisements, and second in an e-mail after having ordered some goods from a small, independent German company. My active command of German leaves something to be desired, but my impression was that all adressing between unacquainted adults would use 'Sie', similar to the usage in Romance languages, but possibly there are nuances I am not aware of. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 00:56, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

I'm fairly sure that I've seen fairly impersonal (e.g. workplace) Italian communications that used uppercase Tu rather than the more usual Lei (or in some regions voi). I think I saw it on a flyer at a school, addressed to the teachers. I'd just be speculating as to the rationale, but it's conceivable it has political connotations. Historically there was a tu di sinistra used on the political left (whereas Lei was considered bourgeois and voi possibly fascist). --Trovatore (talk) 01:27, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

I would add that it's quite common for mass communications to use tu; few would take offense at being thus addressed by, say, a product manual, or an advertisement. --Trovatore (talk) 01:31, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

Wakuran -- I've had quite amicable discussions on French Wikipedia (though my French is not fluent), except with one semi-annoying person. I wondered if he was subtly disrespecting me by addressing me with "tu", but he informed me that there's a quasi-universal "tu" among French Wikipedia collaborators. I don't think that random people who got into conversations on the street or on transit in French cities would necessarily start off with "tu"... AnonMoos (talk) 06:52, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I've also found that there's generally a tu for Internet discussions, in Italian. There's also a tu da palestra for people working out in the gym. It's all very complicated and mine-filled; I'm not sure you'd use that tu for your boss, even if you happened to be waiting for the machine he was using. But that's all speculation as I haven't really been in that situation.

But the general tension that makes it so hard for non-Italians to pick the right word is that tu can be insultingly familiar, whereas lei can be stuffy and pretentious, and there's not necessarily a genuinely safe choice. Depends on age, context, maybe even how the other person is dressed. Luckily they don't expect much of Americans so you get a little bit of rhythm for your mistakes. --Trovatore (talk) 07:36, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

The usage of du has generally become more wide-spread and accepted over the last decades, in particular since the 90s, I guess. It is standard in the German wikipedia (de:Wikipedia:Warum sich hier alle duzen). In advertising, it would depend somewhat on the target demographic; Ikea was a bit of a pioneer there as the usage of du transports a kind of Scandinavian flavour. I'm also not surprised that a small company would use du; again it would depend somewhat on the market they're in. As to capitalisation, there has been some confusion on this, with the reform of 1996 first abolishing capitalisation of du and the change of 2006 permitting it again. The current recommendation is to capitalise du when addressing the reader directly (and not doing so when reporting direct speech where someone else is addressed) [1]. --Wrongfilter (talk) 08:27, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

In the example addressing Elly, the text violates its own recommendation in writing Dir while not addressing the reader directly (except in case the reader is the new chairwoman of the Bach Association).  --Lambiam 10:26, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

As it's apparently Swedish-inspired, it might be worth noting that here in Sweden, the "polite forms" Ni/ Er has made somewhat of a slight comeback, lately, mostly in retail, advertising and official messages from companies, etc. It has been interpreted as a return to the older system, although others have remarked that the older system mostly was a complex system similar to English, where the polite way was to address a person by last name or title, and the "ni"/ "er" forms often a way for the upper classes to talk down to the lower classes, and despite being formal, not being particularly polite. (Most people still won't adress a teacher of doctor with "ni", though.) 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 22:05, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

But will a knight use it to address others? --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 02:24, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

Only at knight-time. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 12:15, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

Most Polish people my age have been taught to always capitalize ty ('you') and twój ('your'), with all their inflected forms, regardless of context. Some do it quite mindlessly: the word ci is both the short form of the dative case of ty ('to you') and the virile plural form of the demonstrative pronoun ('these'); I've seen ci capitalized in both of these senses, even though it doesn't make any sense to capitalize it in the latter sense. — Kpalion^(talk) 10:08, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

Does "virile plural" mean "masculine plural"? Virile and masculine overlap in meaning quite a lot, but virile is not used in grammar. ColinFine (talk) 11:47, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

In Polish, there is actually a further distinction – within the "masculine" gender, there is a sub-category of masculine nouns referring to male people, as opposed to male animals or inanimates that just happen to be grammatically masculine. I've seen the term "virile" for this "human masculine" or "personal masculine" category – it's also used that way on the Wiktionary page linked to by Kpalion. Fut.Perf. ☼ 12:13, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

When speaking of the Russian language, masculine singular nouns for which the accusative and genitive are the same are usually said to be "animate", and the others "inanimate"... AnonMoos (talk) 23:29, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

I think it's the other way around. The condition of animacy determines whether the accusative is the same as the nominative (inanimates) or the genitive (animates). From Russian declension: The category of animacy is relevant in Russian nominal and adjectival declension. Specifically, the accusative has two possible forms in many paradigms, depending on the animacy of the referent. For animate referents (sentient species, some animals, professions and occupations), the accusative form is generally identical to the genitive form (genitive-accusative syncretism). For inanimate referents (simple lifeforms, objects, states, notions), the accusative form is identical to the nominative form (nominative-accusative syncretism). This principle is relevant for masculine singular nouns of the second declension ... and adjectives, and for all plural paradigms (with no gender distinction). -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 18:54, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

Latin alphabet

Why has Japanese never been switched to be written only in romaji? --40bus (talk) 22:17, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

Romanization of Japanese#As a replacement for the Japanese writing system mentions that in the Meiji era, some scholars actually advocated this, but it never caught on. I can imagine there are a few reasons why, including the difficulty in switching fully, general mixed attitudes on Westernization, and also the ambiguity that might arise when homophonous terms with different kanji get condensed into the same romaji. GalacticShoe (talk) 22:34, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

Read Chapter 9 of "Writing Systems" by Geoffrey Sampson for some of the issues that would be involved. It would certainly eliminate a lot of complexity in the current Japanese writing system, but it would make a large amount of scholarly/technical vocabulary confusingly homophonous, and be a huge cultural break with the last 1500 years or so of Japanese cultural traditions. In the case of Turkish, Vietnamese, Korean and so on, the previous writing systems (Arabic, Chu Nom, Chinese characters) had only been mastered by a relatively small elites, and were not fully suitable for teaching large numbers of people to read using basically the language that they spoke. That's not the case in Japan, which has a high literacy rate... AnonMoos (talk) 02:28, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

Considering that the Chinese illiteracy rate in 1949 was over 80%, and that even if you magically gave the whole Chinese population in 1949 literacy many would not have been reading the language they spoke due to the wide divergence between varieties of Chinese, I suspect that none of this would have been an issue in any of those cases had there been the political will to preserve the older system. From another cultural tradition, Arabic script fits both Persian and Turkish badly, but it's still used for the former and not the latter. My impression is that this really comes down more to cultural choices, and that lack of mass literacy simply means that change is possible rather than that the old script is unworkable. Double sharp (talk) 18:34, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Whatever the complexities of Chinese writing, it was invented for writing the Chinese language, and handles some of its issues (widely divergent pronunciations between major "dialects" -- which would be separate languages by most linguistic criteria -- and the high degree of homophony in modern spoken Mandarin). The Arabic alphabet is almost ludicrously unsuited to Turkish, given Turkish vowel harmony, and in Ottoman times it was used to write a hybrid Arabic-Persian-Turkish language which was the plaything of a tiny elite, and quite far removed from spoken Turkish, so it was ripe for replacement as a writing system. No doubt the Arabic alphabet could have been suitably fixed to be able to write Turkish well (though the result would have been a very different writing system from the Arabic alphabet as used to write the Arabic language), but if you're going to make a radical change anyway, why not just go to the Latin alphabet, which can be easily adjusted to result in a simple and adequate writing system for Turkish? AnonMoos (talk) 00:50, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

Why do you think it should? --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 04:15, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

Good point. There's no particular reason to, and many Japanese speakers seem to be well accustomed to English. Also, they do use western-style numbers. <-Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots-> 04:38, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

And maybe because people want to be able to read their spouses' diaries.--Shirt58 (talk) 11:13, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

As there's no reason to do so. Japan has kana which has a similar role to Romanisation, but is better as it much more closely matches how Japanese is spoken. Romanisation is always an approximation, as can be seen from the variety of Romanisation schemes that have been devised, with none clearly correct or best.--2A04:4A43:900F:F1A6:10B1:1D0F:14BE:DD6A (talk) 11:30, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

Additional to the above, it's worth highlighting why Romanisations are so varied and all wrong in some way. It's as the Latin alphabet, i.e. Roman letters, have such wildly differing ways of being used in e.g. European languages.

So a Frenchman goes to Japan and devises a Romanisation based on French. A German based on German. A Scot based on Scots. Etc. No matter how close an approximation each is, they will all be different from each other. None is the correct or best; which gets used depends as much on luck or politics as any features of the particular scheme.--2A04:4A43:900F:F1A6:525:195:3223:C1B5 (talk) 21:41, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

I don't know. Hepburn romanization mostly has the consonant sounds similar to English and the vowel sounds similar to Latin or Italian. It's still widely used among Westerners without necessarily having either of the languages as their mother tongue. ± Wakuran (talk) 21:58, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

Similar. It's not the same. It's similar. All romanisations only approximate. And as for what 2A04:4A43:900F:F1A6:525:195:3223:C1B5 wrote above: some are suited for some people better than for others. It's like with food, computers or anything else: there is no absolute best, there is only a best choice for a given set of conditions. --Ouro (blah blah) 17:43, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Romanizations of a language A based on a language B designed to evoke the phonetics of language A through already-existent phonetics in language B are going to be flawed if the two languages fundamentally have different sounds, for sure. In this case though, while Romanizations of Japanese are probably based on phonetics of other languages, they generally don't seem to be about evoking said phonetics. If we consider Romanization only in terms of their representation of Japanese phonetics specifically, I think that systems like Hepburn romanization do actually work remarkably well in providing consistent transcription. Of course, as with the earlier given examples of Persian and Arabic script, just because you adopt a script to represent your language and its sounds doesn't mean said script will always work very well. And also of course this doesn't mean that Japanese should switch over to Romanization-only, as per my earlier comment mentioning kanji. Rather, I just think that Romanization is a surprisingly useful system independent of its potential phonetic origin languages. GalacticShoe (talk) 18:20, 3 February 2024 (UTC)