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David Perlmutter's avatar

Since French is one of the official languages of Canada, I have taken courses ranging from elementary to university on it. I envy the romantic languages because having subject and object versions of "you" makes it clearer to know when one is addressing a single person or a larger group. Because English uses "you" to refer to both single people and groups, I get confused when it used whether or not the speaker is referring to me personally or not. (Must be an autistic thing.)

And then, of course, French as spoken in the main Canadian province where it is the dominant language- Quebec- is very different from how it is spoken in France and elsewhere...

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Daniel Nest's avatar

In Danish, "you" is "du" (or "De" if you're very respectful to an older person but it's honestly never used these days - I think even an older person would take offense that you're "aging" them by using it.)

In Russian, it's "ты" (very hard to write the correct sound in English using available letters - it's a bit like "tee" but rougher - Google does a good job of showing the pronunciation.)

In Ukrainian, it's "ти" (which is spelled differently but pronounced essentially the same as the Russian version.)

So it looks like the roots of all of them go to the same place.

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