Comment by hajile
19 hours ago
Both of these issues come because our ancestors messed up changing the language.
Centuries ago, "thou" was singular second person and "you" was plural second person.
"Thou" got abandoned and "you" lost its original meaning to replace "thou" as the new singular second person.
"You guys" or "y'all" are simply attempts to re-introduce a needed pronoun.
So we get to fight sexism AND bring back cool anachronistic language? I'm in.
IIRC "you" was also the formal second person pronoun (like usted in Spanish or vous in French).
I think it's all just normal evolution of language. I actually think it's kinda neat how different English-speaking subcultures found different ways to reintroduce the pronoun.
"I think it's all just normal evolution of language."
The normal way for languages to evolve is for words to spread into different (adjacent) forms in order to express more nuances of their original meaning(s). The collapse of words' meanings, and for basic things as (nominative case) pronouns no less, like it happened in English for "thou" and "you", is not fitting the definition of "normal" in the larger context of linguistics domain.
Australia has 'yous' for plural you. Yous is used exactly how you might think it'd be used.
Beware! Y’all doesn’t necessarily include everyone:
> All y'all is used in the Southern United States when a speaker wishes to include everyone being addressed. Y'all may refer to an indefinite set of members of a group, but all y'all definitively includes everyone in the group.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/all_y%27all
I dunno, as someone who’s lived their entire life in the southern US this sounds really pedantic. At best.
Also, is it just me or does that Wikipedia entry have zero citations? I thought Wikipedia was allergic to citation-free claims..
I just asked my SO and she confirmed that "all y'all" means everyone within earshot and "y'all" usually means a specific group of people. She also said "y'all" is similar to "on" in French and "youse guys" in the NE.
I'm guessing it's regional and/or group specific.