folks who speak a language that has a formal/informal 'you', how has usage of this shifted over the last twenty-five years or so?
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Replying to @BeijingPalmer
Polish had a nice subtlety—there was a formal 'you' imported from Russian that told you your interlocutor was a communist apparatchik. It died along with Communism and is not mourned. The mechanism native to the language, a third-person formal (like in Spanish) lives on.
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Replying to @Pinboard @BeijingPalmer
To be clear, the word ("wy", second person plural) exists in Polish, but the usage as a formal 'you' is restricted to two populations: 1. Far left apparatchiks (now extinct) 2. Extremely conservative hypercatholic highlanders So it is a very polarized pronoun!
10:33 AM - 16 Apr 2020
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