Path: ...!2.eu.feeder.erje.net!feeder.erje.net!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!not-for-mail From: ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) Newsgroups: sci.lang Subject: Re: How and why did English lose "thou" Date: 20 May 2025 20:31:12 GMT Organization: Stefan Ram Lines: 15 Expires: 1 Jun 2026 11:59:58 GMT Message-ID: References: <795757794.769464005.411061.grimblecrumble870-gmail.com@news.newsdemon.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: news.uni-berlin.de E0VTuVQDK7gS3uqKkn3tgQpaxWBfCpelZTddHfep124DFW Cancel-Lock: sha1:yyxXU4PDJ2HqWd8jW/FKFs0je1U= sha256:xUNZbgZXgUNO59k1g5WqcEj0lgnu4R2PeaFYv4Njv5o= X-Copyright: (C) Copyright 2025 Stefan Ram. All rights reserved. Distribution through any means other than regular usenet channels is forbidden. It is forbidden to publish this article in the Web, to change URIs of this article into links, and to transfer the body without this notice, but quotations of parts in other Usenet posts are allowed. X-No-Archive: Yes Archive: no X-No-Archive-Readme: "X-No-Archive" is set, because this prevents some services to mirror the article in the web. But the article may be kept on a Usenet archive server with only NNTP access. X-No-Html: yes Content-Language: en-US Bytes: 2112 ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote or quoted: >Other languages kept the whole formal/informal thing So, I've noticed that calling someone "Sir" in English kind of lines up with how we use the more formal "Sie" in German, where there's a bit of distance. On the other hand, if you use "dude", it feels a lot more familiar, like the German "Du". But it also depends on where you are. Like, if a woman in the audience asks a question during a talk, a speaker in the South might call her "Ma'am!" to bring her into the conversation. If you tried that in England, though, you might get, "Please don't call me 'Ma'am'!"