• nednobbins@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    “You” is also ungendered. There seems to be a common idea that English is missing a second person plural. We have one, it’s “you”. We just stopped using the second person singular. That’s what all those variations of “thee, thou, thy” etc were.

    “Y’all” would be a superpluralization. If that’s still not enough we also have the ultraplural form of, “all y’all”

    • pythonoob@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      Y’all is exclusive. All y’all is inclusive.

      If I walk into a party in a house and a group of my friends are there and I say ‘what are y’all doing here?’, I’m only talking to my friends.

      If I walk into my own house and there’s a party there and I say ‘what are all y’all doing here?’ I’m addressing everyone of the hoodlums in my house.

      Edit: To the person who down voted yet contributed nothing to the convo, please feel obliged to read up on clusivity in linguistics.

      • Art35ian@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        We’re very inclusive in Australia also.

        ‘G’day you bunch of cunts’ means hello to everyone male, female, known and unknown.

        We’re very polite over here.

      • gmtom@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Getting pressed enough about a single downvote to make an edit is cringe.

      • nednobbins@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Yeah. We mostly think of grammatical number as a simple choice of singular vs plural but that’s not what we do in real life.

        We generally have multiple labels that describe the concept of progressively expanding circles of what’s included when we think of ourselves.

        There’s the very narrow sense of I/me/myself. We have various expansions around us/all’y’all. Jamaicans have the phrase “I and I” which focuses on the individual but explicitly calls out the connection with others.

      • nednobbins@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Sounds right.
        Presumably “y’all’s” would be the second person superplural possessive.

      • nednobbins@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        We also have “Ya’” where we elide the entire ending and you need to determine plural vs singular from context. For example, “Ya’ can’t get thea, les’ ya been there befoa.”