Surely Time magazine will suffer ongoing embarrassment for its stupid Person of the Year decision: You, of course. (Not me.) But Colbert again brings a little language angle to this deal: He started with a bit about how English lacks a sg-pl distinction in second person pronouns, so that he could have known that it wasn't him particularly who won, but all of us. (Well, everybody but me ... I really don't want to be PotY.) Of course, even a high class Charleston guy like Colbert surely grew up with y'all for the plural.
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
You (pl)
Surely Time magazine will suffer ongoing embarrassment for its stupid Person of the Year decision: You, of course. (Not me.) But Colbert again brings a little language angle to this deal: He started with a bit about how English lacks a sg-pl distinction in second person pronouns, so that he could have known that it wasn't him particularly who won, but all of us. (Well, everybody but me ... I really don't want to be PotY.) Of course, even a high class Charleston guy like Colbert surely grew up with y'all for the plural.
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Oh come on, is it really so clear that Time would have used a plural pronoun here? In German, I could easily imagine the reader being addressed in the singular. And in my own dialect (with choices of which plural pronoun to use here!) I think either singular or plural would be fine. Especially for 'person of the year' (*people of the year), the singular might sound better. My fellow Carolinian may be good at inventing words, but he needs a little help with linguistic analysis.
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