In Spanish the "thou" word ("tú") never died out, though I'm told in Argentina calling everyone "vos" is a regional thing But in the 17th century the Spanish aristocracy started going even further and being *ultra*-polite
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Replying to @arthur_affect @revivingfisking
Habitually addressing your social betters in the *third* person, by a title Not just "vosotros" or "vos" but "Vuestra Merced", "Your Mercy"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @revivingfisking
There were multiple titles, like "Your Grace", "Your Highness", etc but "Your Mercy" was the all-purpose one And "Your Mercy" became so commonly used that it got slurred and shortened from "Vuestra Merced" to "vuestraced" to "vuestred" to just "usted"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @revivingfisking
This is why the grammatical quirk that when fully spelled out "usted" is lowercase but abbreviated as "Ud." it's capitalized, it's technically a proper noun
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Replying to @arthur_affect @revivingfisking
And see, while in Spain "tú" (informal 2nd person singular), "usted" (formal 2nd person singular), "vosotros" (informal 2nd person plural) and "ustedes" (formal 2nd person plural) all coexist, in Latin America they were so ultra-polite "usted" completely replaced "vosotros"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @revivingfisking
The ONLY WAY to speak to someone politely in Mexico is to call them "Your Grace", the actual word "you" has become archaic and obsolete And while some would just call this a quirk of language, it is obviously related to 17th century Spain being a massive colonial slave empire
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Replying to @arthur_affect @revivingfisking
People in the colonies spoke much more formally and ultra-politely than in Spain because they had to It's creepy when you think about what "usted" literally means, "Your Mercy" You're begging "Hey random dude please don't call the cops on me" with every sentence
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Replying to @arthur_affect @revivingfisking
Obviously to most modern Spanish speakers this is just natural and you don't really "hear" it anymore any more than we think "Hey you!" is a "polite" thing to say to someone But the markers of the past are always still there in language
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Replying to @arthur_affect @revivingfisking
The usted form is literally talking to someone like you're a waiter in a fancy restaurant, it's technically in the grammatical third person "I would like to welcome Sir and ask Sir if he finds everything to his liking. Shall I take his order or is he still deciding?"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @revivingfisking
Hey, I get your point but I disagree, there are over 20+ Spanish-speaking countries and the ud / tu is not an iron clad formal / informal rule. In my city we use ud with close friends and to denote respect. This is from a native speaker and a Usted user.
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Well yeah it's a language with 500 million speakers so generalizations are problematic I'm really just talking about the history of its evolution, as it was told to me, not what it "objectively" means now
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Replying to @arthur_affect @revivingfisking
I do tend to adjust the use of usted with my pals from Spain, bc they hear it differently. But I use ud exclusively with all of my besties from childhood, ( GenXers from
#Bogotá) We all use Ud amongst ourselves. Tú is overly chummy like we were born in the same household.
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Replying to @linagato @revivingfisking
One of the things my Spanish teacher told us about was the verb "tutear", which means "to address someone as tú", the equivalent of "thouing" someone in Shakespeare And she said "Podemos tutearnos?" is something you only really hear in Spain
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