At 12:47 PM 01/14/2003 -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
Some of this is natural. I've adopted the southern "y'all" because English has no plural third person and this ambiguity is annoying when you're emailing to several people. Note also the efficiency of the contraction.
"You" and "Y'all" and "Youse guys" and similar forms are second person; third person is he/she/it/they/ dem guys.
Thou shouldst know that "You" is already plural, having been adopted as more formal than the second person familiar single "Thee / Thou" and replacing the nominative second person plural "ye". The analogy in German is "Sie" used as formal singular/plural as opposed to "du" and "ihr". And while some of the edges have been bashed off of irregular verbs, if you'd a-been fixin' to talk about some verb forms being simpler, you shouldn't'a started out pickin' Southern grammar as an example.
