‘Tu’ or ‘Vous’?

January 6, 2015 • 9:00 am

by Matthew Cobb

Anyone who’s spent any time speaking French in a Francophone country will have come across the social minefield that is the choice of which second person pronoun to use –’tu’ (singular) or ‘vous’ (plural) – when referring to a single person.

I lived in Paris for 18 years, and was initially worried about my inability to grasp the social subtleties, but then realised that my French friends were all having difficulties, too, and discussions about who one would tu-toie and who one would vous-voie would abound. Things are changing, and TV and radio presenters now regularly tu-toie each other, in a way that would have been impossible in 1984 when I first moved there.

If you still don’t get it, last year the LA Times produced this very useful infographic by William Alexander, author of a book I haven’t read, Flirting With French: How a Language Charmed Me, Seduced Me, and Almost Broke My Heart. It pretty much sums up the situation, though it could do with ‘Are you a policeman talking to a potential criminal? Are they rich (VOUS)? Are they poor (TU)?’

Underlying all this is the use of tu/vous in often unstated power relations. This can take odd forms – in 1984, my lab head wanted to tu-toie me; I didn’t like him much so insisted on vous-voieing him as a way of keeping my distance.

And there’s the apocryphal story of French politician Jacques Chirac, who famously tu-toied everyone except his wife (see chart), talking to inscrutable French President François Mitterrand when Chirac became Prime Minister: ‘On peut se tu-toie maintenant?’ To which the sphinx-like Mitterrand responded: ‘Si vous voulez’.

Finally, my personal advice – if in the slightest doubt, use ‘Vous’. Better to be seen as a stuffy foreigner than to be over-familiar. But you shouldn’t worry – they’ll forgive you anything because you’re making the effort to speak French, and if you’re an anglophone you will have a delightful accent…

tu

h/t Nelly on FB ~

304 thoughts on “‘Tu’ or ‘Vous’?”

  1. Ha, ha! I remember reading that Albert Camus had a bit of trouble with this. Something about explaining to his lover that he preferred “vous” even in pillow talk.

  3. I’m reminded of a rebuff that I got in Sweden in the 1960’s when addressing a much older Professor, (I was 22 and Swedish is not my first language)….”Jag ar inte du till ni!” He said. Trans. “I am not thou to you!” It was an interesting demonstration of how languages diverge.

    2. But now in Sweden, most people, at least younger ones, always say du. It really annoyed my Swedish wife the first time a gas-station attendant called her du. But it annoys her more now, when there are no more gas-station attendants.

    3. That’s similar to the apocryphal story of the old Yorkshireman addressed informally by a youth, and who responded with, “Thee thous them as thous thee, and not afore, lad!”

  4. Is is roughly parallel to when an English speaker would use a first name versus title and last name?

    1. That is becoming archaic. Even in formal correspondence amongst peers, we would say “Jim Watson” and subsequently “Jim”.

      For an example of how things have changed, see the post earlier today where in Crick’s letter he referred to “Watson” only. That would be considered abrupt and rude today.

  5. I think I’d prefer that problem to not knowing whether any given “you” is singular or plural.

    Right, you guys?

    1. Oui, but it’s easy to learn and remember, so that goes on the pro-list, imo.

      KISS. 🙂

    3. Well, down South, it’s easy. “Y’all” is singular; “All y’all” is plural; and “All y’alls” is collective plural.

      …or so I’m led to understand….

      b&

  6. The funny thing is in English we went the other way & use the polite form for everyone – you – formerly it was in nominative
    I
    We
    Thou
    You/Ye
    She/He/It
    They

      1. …& then as many will know we have ‘yous’ as a modern plural in the north of England & in Scotland, that has re-evolved.

          4. In Scotland, “yous” is considered “common”, or indicative of a poor education. The Northern Isles still use “thou”, pronounced “thoo”.

          5. I think it is considered low brow here too but I want to change that. I like “yous”.

    2. Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’ (Act 3, Scene 2) has a lovely example of the impolite use of the singular ‘thou’ to denote a lack of respect for someone who is ostensibly a social equal and should properly be addressed as ‘you’. Sir Toby Belch, encouraging his companion Sir Andrew Aguecheek to provoke another character to a duel, suggests that

      “If thou “thou”-est him some thrice, it shall not be amiss”.

      The irony here is that Sir Toby himself is insulting Sir Andrew by addressing him as “thou”.

    3. Quakers were ahead of the rest, treating high and low equally as “thou/thee” (and later as “thee” only? – or so films like “Friendly Persuasion” would have us believe), sticking with it till it seemed like an affectation, which Quakers also abhor.

      Here in New Zealand, possibly influenced by Māori, which has three numbers, singular, dual and plural, for all persons (and inclusive and exclusive first person duals and plurals), “yous” and “youfullas” are in informal use but they go by number, not rank.

      1. Yup, Rarotongan and similar languages have that too (same source, of course). It’s almost as if, having simplified pronouns by leaving gender out, they had to introduce a compensatory complication with the inclusive/exclusive forms and the dual form.

        Makes me wonder if there’s a sort of natural level of complication that languages tend to stabilise at. If it’s too simple people tend to add fiddly bits till the number of fiddly bits is as much as the average person can handle, and there it levels off. (This is a bit of wild speculation and probably half-baked).

    4. Maybe it has something to do with the thorn letter (þ or Þ in Icelandic script), which was used in old English and was printed with the letter Y in printing presses (German ones meant for printing Latin) where the letter was unavailable. The word ‘The’ was Þe , which got printed Ye (as in “Ye Olde .. “), and ‘ Thou’, which was Þou, got printed You, making the polite form You and Thou appear the same – You.

      Since many non-English speakers in the British Isles (speakers of Welsh, Cornish, Manx, Gaelic etc.) and elsewhere were forced to learn English through printed matter, this could have spread. By the time they realised that it is better to use digraphs like ‘Th’ instead, it was already too late.
      Maybe I’m wrong, as English isn’t my first language and I gleaned this somewhere on the net, a language forum, but I find this an interesting explanation.

      1. This is reminiscent of the substitution that was used in transcribing Fijian – ‘C’ for th, ‘B’ for mb, ‘D’ for nd, ‘G’ for ng, ‘Q’ for ngg

        So ‘Nadi’ is pronounced Nandi, ‘Beqa’ is Mbenga, ‘Cakobau’ is Thakombau and so on. I always thought that perverse and confusing, but apparently (Google tells me) the missionaries tried using the obvious English digraphs like ‘th’ but the Fijians insisted on regarding digraphs as two separate sounds, so the missionaries used single ‘spare’ letters instead. I never knew that.

        This was presumably quite acceptable to the Fijians, who had never used ‘C’ before so found no confusion in pronouncing it ‘th’. The only people it confused were Englishmen. 😉

  7. If I’m grokking it right, we’ve got it in baconmark as well, but these days it’s only used around royalty. Tu/Du, Vous/De.

    France sounds like a very polite place. 🙂

    1. I think when you have large numbers on non-native speakers learning a new tongue that changes these subtleties in a language. Probably that was one reason why Old English mutated into Middle English, from first Baconlanders then Normans (second-hand Baconlanders!)…

          1. Aye, and by all means let us know if you need any.

            So much bacon…..and cheese…..and beer..oh, and windmills.

            No wonder some people mistake us for the Dutch.

          2. I spent a few weeks in Jutland (and also a couple of trips to Copenhagen) and have always loved Denmark.

            I don’t remember the bacon so much as:
            The lovely herrings, prepared many ways
            That bread that is composed of the huge (soft) grains
            Bread (generally)
            Pastries
            Ice cream
            Cheeses!
            Smoked fishes
            Beer!
            Cream
            Coffee
            Waffles
            Akavit

            Oh, I’m hungry now!

          3. We do love our bread and in the past decade or so old grain sorts have had a revival. It’s heavy bread!

            If you can muster the stomach for akvavit/snaps, you’re one up on me.

            I can’t get it down. 🙂

  8. Fun chart. I speak Spanish (as much as I can muster) to my kids and only use Usted (not Tu). In fact, I never use Tu for anyone, period. If Spanish speakers have problems with that they need to grow up 🙂

    1. I can assure you that not many (if any) Spanish people would have a problem with you addressing them formally. Children might find it a little strange if not embarrassing or even giggle behind your back. They, of course, will eventually “grow up” and perhaps become your friends at which point to address them formally would be down right rude and unfriendly. Adults might invite you to use tu/tú which would again appear rude if you ignore it.

      1. I have found this in France (giggling children) as well. I often forget that I should use tu with them and address them as vous.

      2. I attended a language class in Madrid in 2001. The teacher, a very nice young man just out of university, spoke no English, so the class was completely in Spanish. He used “tu” with all of the students, even those several decades older. He insisted we all use tu. He said that in Spain usted was pretty much done away with after Franco was gone. There had been so much oppression under Franco, that out of a desire for equality the Spanish people started using tu for everyone. We asked him, but what if– what if he was meeting his girlfriend’s grandparents for the first time? He said he would use tu.

        I have often wondered if this was really true across Spain. I think Spanish speaking people from Latin America maintain use of usted.

  9. To be honest, tu/vous is the least of my worries when I speak French. It is remembering which gender an inanimate object is …..

    1. Same problem here with German. How the deuce are you supposed to know what gender different things are?

      1. Yes, me too. Turns out my German friends can’t remember either except for familiar nouns.

        They said to me, “Ja, ja, der, die, das: machts nichts! Wir verstehen.”

        1. I’ve always found Germans to be the most forgiving of language mistakes. They tend not to laugh at you.

          7. > And surely a German should say “vould”?

            Yeah, it’s part of the cliché, but I don’t get why. Unlike the “th’s” it’s not hard to pronounce for German speakers.

          4. Oh ,man, I can’t remember. I don’t think I watched it regularly, but the song stuck with me.

            I was more into early morning weekend cartoons on super channel and sky channel… that’s how I picked up a lot of English as a pre-schooler.

          15. Shhhh! I’m not here. Trying to sleep.

            Catch yous heathens on the flipside.

            Bis morgens! 🙂

          26. shhhh…i’m trying to hide from Merilee…she’s got chickens!!

            You better hide!!

          37. Which game, Jesper? We’re a bit behind and just watched the beginning of a game (somewhere in Basque country) in which neither Messi nor Naymar opened. Is it the Copa one?

          38. Just looked it up. Must have been Atletico Madrid. Not sure how we missed taping this one. I think we thought it was a repeat of the one we saw last week:-(

            Jesper, maybe you can tell me what the scoop is with Barcelona now. Is the season over, or is there just a break and then it begins again (I mean La Liga)?

            soccer newbie

          39. It was against Atletico and a sweet 3-1 victory. 🙂

            3 crucial points.

            This was the start of the last half of the season after holidays. Real Madrid are looking good, but there’s still a good chance of catching them……I’m just hoping they throw away some stupid points away from home.

            I think it’s it’s gonna be us or Real that takes it this year, with Atletico as the dark horse.

            5 more months to go! 🙂

          44. No, but it should have taped this morning. Don’t watch daytime TV (except during World Cup;-) Just getting a head start on the festivities;-)

          47. Weeeeee!!!

            I completely forgot the season started up last weekend, but it was a loss. Sometimes selective memory is a bliss. 🙂

          48. Real Sociedad ( from San Sebastian) is the team they were playing in the game we just watched and in which the only goal was for RS scored by Barca’s Alba (own goal). Neymar and Messi weren’t put in till near the end. Was this game not important?

          54. @Merilee
            Of course we had the regulars.
            Krümmelmoster (Cookie Monster), Graf Zahl (The Count), Placido Flamingo’s name stayed the same.
            The inhabitants of the Sesamstraße were adapted, well known actors played the human roles and there were quite a few a-list celebs as guests.

          56. What is up with the imagery. The dentist juxtaposed with buying a budgie!

            I did see a Schnecke in puppet form though.

          57. Don’t you always stop and buy a budgie when you go to the dentist? I thought it was the Canadian way;-)

    2. I just put “le” in front of everything. I’m pretty sure a Francophone can figure it out.

    3. I do my best to memorize both the word and the article together:

      la maison
      le vin

      der Tor
      die Tür
      das Tier

      Yes, it’s a pain for a native English speaker.
      Declension? Wha- … ??

  10. It’s generally called the “respectful” form. Italian (which I know reasonably well) has something similar. One uses “vous” to indicate respect, regardless of social status, richness, or position of power.

    (I kind of prefer the Italian method more, though, which has a separate respectful form that doesn’t conflict as much with the plural.)

    1. In Italian the repectful form is ‘Lei’ which is actually the third person (‘Would Sir like to order now?’) which is only singular. In the plural there is only ‘Voi’. The familiar singular is ‘Tu’. However under Fascism, Mussolini tried to impose the English system: ‘Voi’ for everybody, singular or plural. When I went to Italy first (c1982) some of the older people still used Voi in the formal singular for this reason, whereas most would expect you to use Lei as good manners. Young people tend to use Tu straight away. The 1960’s tended to breakdown such formalities.
      At work there is the tendency to use the formal form unless agreed otherwise. Bel casino!

  12. It’s not just French. I even read a story about how when someone (I forget who, it could have been Gorbachev) in the government was chastizing Yeltsin they used the rudely familiar in Russian, showing him disrespect.

    My language teachers always told us to err on the side of politeness but I find I’m so familiar as an Anglo Canadian that I have to force myself to use the German Sie or the French Vous. I know I probably come off as rather too rude/familiar.

    1. It’s kind of funny how the implication of the usage have switched depending on country.

      If a stranger used the plural form talking to me, I’d probably feel slightly offended and very awkward.

      The complete opposite compared to the past.

    2. “My language teachers always told us to err on the side of politeness”

      Me too. And I always do.

      As Matthew said: “Better to be seen as a stuffy foreigner than to be over-familiar.”

    1. And in Spanish it gets more complicated because different countries (for example Spain, Mexico, Argentina) use different forms of the pronouns and different conjugations of the verbs.

      1. Oh, don’t tell me this! I am about to start in on Spanish (beyond the superficial stuff I know from being a USian and studying French and Italian). 🙂

        1. Don’t worry about this. If you are learning Spanish in the USA, I imagine the course will be designed for the usage in the Americas. Having said that though, you will find that most Spanish speakers are able to understand one another irrespective of where they come from, sometimes with a few laughs along the way.

          1. “you will find that most Spanish speakers are able to understand one another irrespective of where they come from, sometimes with a few laughs along the way”

            OK, I feel better now! 🙂

          2. Well, yeah, but the cleaning crew in my former office were mainly from Central America. They always greeted me in the morning with “buenos dias.” I greeted them with “buen dia” all day long. That’s the rioplatense way. The cleaners would have none of it, always corrected me to “buenos dias” or “buenas tardes” depending on the time of day.

          1. Oh yeah.

            I found that that it was worst with the “second, second” language (German then French for me). With the third “second” language, it somehow got easier that way. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (At least for me.)

            Yes, Italian and French trip me up that way. And I do already confuse Italian and Spanish words (my son is learning Spanish).

            A funny pair that seems to get me every time is:

            la tache (spot, Fr)
            die Tasche (bag or pocket, Ger)

            🙂

          2. When I was in high school, I took German in the morning, followed by Latin, the. German. That worked ok but in years where Latin didn’t separate the two modern languages, I would mix up German with French.

  15. It’s pretty much the same for German, one of the hurdles for non-native speakers, esp. English ones. I taught German for foreigner classes and that was an important topic. German has other “problem” features, like der/die/das – the 3 genders of nouns, the changing adjectives with noun gernder and grammatical case.

    For German natives the “th”s are the hardest to learn, we don’t have these phonems in German.

    1. The umlauts were also a challenge for me (USian) learning German (my first non-native language).

      I found that once you figured out how to listen and then repeat those unfamiliar vowel sounds in one language, it came much easier in others.

      1. I don’t understand how German vowels ever became ‘unfamiliar’ in (most parts of) the US, given that near half the population emigrated from there a few generations ago. It’s like everyone got brainwiped at Ellis Island when they were forced to put all their diacritics in the pile. 🙂

        1. One reason is the two world wars. Germans and Italians were the enemy and their languages would not have been welcome. Some schools dropped German language courses.

          1. Yes, especially after the First World War. There was a very strong anti-German feeling in the US in the 1920s.

            Which is interesting because German is the largest “former European heritage” group in the US.

            The melting pot was interesting. When my ancestors from Northern Europe came over in the 1890s, there was a very strong imperative to assimilate. Despite that, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and German language churches survived in this area (Minnesota) even up to today. My paternal great grandmother never learned to speak English (properly), even though she lived many decades in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

          2. Minnesota? I keep hearing about that Lake Wobegon area. Hard as hell to find on a map. Several Lutheran churches I understand. The cold temps must keep some of the pot from melting.

      2. I found French harder to pronounce. German took work then snapped together and made the most sense to me ever since. I joke that I’m a reincarnation of my great great grandmother who emigrated to NZ from Germany.

    2. I learned German as a boy living in Germany mostly by being immersed in the culture, though there was also a required German language / culture course at school. By about two years I was fluent enough to pass as German in typical social interaction, i.e. on a par with native German speakers my age.

      Though the formal instruction was surely of some benefit, I can honestly say that memorizing genders, declensions, cases and other technical aspects of the language had little if any impact. Humans are pretty good at learning languages, especially when they are young.

      Unfortunately over decades of nearly complete disuse I can barely speak any German anymore. I can understand it quite a bit better than I can speak it, though that may not be saying much.

      Similarly, my wife’s family is Québécois, and she grew up speaking nothing but at home till a certain age. These days she can’t speak much more French than I can, and again that isn’t saying a whole lot. What’s funny is that her mother, though fairly fluent in English, has such a strong Québécois accent that I can hardly understand a thing she says even when she speaks English, and neither can her daughter (my wife)!

      1. Kids under a certain age just seem to absorb languages by osmosis. I learned German along with English in Vienna from ages 1 to 6,then French in Martinique from 6-8. Once in Martinique I apparently refused to practice German anymore w my parents, but picked it up again when we went back to Vienna for my last two years of HS. I don’t have much opportunity to speak it these days, and I’m sure I’m really rusty, but it does come back adequately when necessary or given a chance. I think when you learn it young it sticks better. It also helps to have an ear for, an interest in, languages. I love all the permutations of words and accents. ( my bf is absolutely hopeless…)
        I do have a good Honduran-Cnadian friend, married to a German, and we have lots of fun speaking a mélange of English/German/French/Italian/Spanish, often all mixed in a single sentence.

        But québecois is another thing altogether!

        1. There’s the old myth about musicality and language. There may be something to it regarding pronunciation, and maybe it’s easier to recollect words and phrases if you sort of have a tune or a visualization to accompany it?

          2. I get it with all music and sometimes with language. There’s always something visual about sounds.

            It sucks when in studio mode because all music gets deconstructed, so there’s no ear room for pleasure listening. It usually takes a week or so to return to relax mode. 🙂

          4. Oh, dear. Now we’re getting personal. I might regret this.

            We’ve pretty much deleted most stuff on the tube, but I think our one and only album is still online at spotify, iTunes, etc.

            Here’s a live one from a festival. Don’t mind the lyrics.

            http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFvd0d2vsOc

          7. I suck at music. It was my lowest mark in high school. I excel at language and I think it is something to do with the same defect that makes it impossible for me to understand math. My friends and family refuse to believe I have discalculia but all the symptoms are there, esp the language ability. My parents try to convince me that it is just that I think I can’t do math (forgetting that math took up all my time in high school and if I hadn’t been smart in other areas that were neglected because of it, I would have failed completely. They just don’t want to accept that you can be smart (or stupid) and have a learning disability.

          8. Different natural talents seem to go together. Math and music is one example.
            Long ago, out of work, I applied, for the heck of it, at a little place that made dental implants. The manager first asked if I played a musical instrument. I said no, and asked why he asked. He said the work required very good visualization skill of a certain type and that most of his employees were also musicians. I gulped and took his application exam which I failed miserably.

          9. I’ve read that some believe dyscalculia is a problem with working memory. That would make sense with the visualization stuff. I also consider myself a learner that does so by hearing things.

          10. The now standard idea that there are separate modes of learning has been brought into question lately. For decades now the understanding was that you can learn by hearing, visually, musically, etc. But I see examples frequently to support that concept. Stay tuned.

          11. I think too much is made of the “music is math!” and “music is language!” memes, both of which, ironically, get a lot of play.

            I think it’s mostly it’s own thing, and comparisons to either math or spoken language are superficial.

            That’s as far as I’ll get into discussing it for now. If pressed, I may try to offer some rationales for that assertion.

          12. Music as math I susoect comes from that Romantic period notion of music and math being the closest to the thing itself. At least, that’s probably where it got its biggest push. I’m sure the Ancients suggested similar things here and there, I just can’t recall specifics.

          13. I can relate. I never graduated math in high school and sucked at it all through primary. It has never been logical or natural to me and I still can’t do basic things on paper.

            But then a couple of years ago I went back to school and got my equivalency with relative ease and scored a good grade on top of that. All thanks to a great teacher.

            Back in primary my main recollection of a math lesson was the teacher reading a newspaper while we were doing exercises.

            No motivation whatsoever. That one stuck with me well into my adulthood. I’ll never be a natural, but I was surprised at how much difference a good teacher could do.

            Can’t you take a test for the discalculia thing, or isn’t it recognized?

          14. OMG I had the exact elementary experience with my math teachers. I distinctly remember handing in a math paper, her putting down her romance novel (I shit you not) and telling me I got one of the answers wrong so go back and fix it. This repeated so many times, I think i put a hole in the paper.

            In HS most of my teachers weren’t interested in the kids with problems and wanted to just cater to the kids who excelled at math though some were nice enough to try to help me after class. I couldn’t afford a tutor so I just struggled along.

            I don’t know that dyscalculia is really recognized. It certainly wasn’t when I was a kid. I had poor schooling because I grew up in a hick town. I didn’t realize this until I was an adult and spoke to others about there elementary school experiences. I think better teachers would have made a world of difference.

          15. Yeah, I grew up in a small town too. My most vivid memory of very early math was my teacher rolling his eyes and the whole class laughing because I answered 0 times something wrong.

            We’re damaged goods. 🙂

          16. I think many cases of people thinking they just don’t have a natural ability for a certain discipline are actually the result of crappy teaching.

            Just because someone occupies the…occupation of teacher doesn’t mean they’re especially good at it.

          18. In our school board the policy was that any teacher from whatever discipline could teach up through 10th grade math. Crazy!!! We had too many kind of stuck teaching math who did not understand the basics. They memorized, which is the worst thing for math. I had one colleague who was a really good and caring and diligent person, and gym teacher and counsellor, who kept coming to me to explain simple ratios to her. And she taught 9th and 10th Math for years!

          19. I had a really sexist phys ed teacher for English one year. I hated the guy. He was a horrible teacher, however I excelled in English so it didn’t affect me. When that happened in math it was a disaster for me. I did have some bona fide math teachers, but they just weren’t good at teaching it.

          20. Couldn’t agree more. I think teachers especially during the early years are more important than we often think.

            Off to a bad start and there’s no guarantee that the right teacher will come along and undo the damage.

          21. I thought thst languages and math went together. Math really is a language. You might just not have been taught math well.

          22. No I don’t think ,at his natural to us like a language is and typically they are very separate. My language skills were always crazy good and my math skills crazy bad. Very extreme. If you knew me for only my language, you’d think I was smart and gifted. If you knew me for my math, you’d conclude I was slow. It’s pretty much how I was treated in school as well. People who knew me in both worlds couldn’t reconcile the two.

          23. Interesting. Languages and math have always been my strongest. Sucked at drawing. OK at music. Enjoy/ed history but not great at remembering the details. Math and languages and science it seemed to me you could figure out, not memorize. Though of course you have to memorize some vocab and grammar rules if you don’t absorb/osmose( don’t think that’s a word?) them.

          24. I think I would disagree that maths and languages ‘go together’. Maths is based on rigid logic, languages are far more complex and have their own logic which is strongly influenced by custom.

            As it happened I was good at maths (usually), good at English more or less by instinct – I just ‘know’ when a construction is grammatical or otherwise without necessarily being able to explain why.

            But anyway, with maths, I found it vital to understand why some algorithm worked – having a teacher who could explain it clearly was critical. For example, logarithms – I must have missed the fundamental explanation (maybe I was away for a day), so for some years I just used them cook-book style without really understanding them. Then one day I was trying to explain them to someone else and it dawned on me that adding logarithms in order to multiply was exactly like adding powers of 10 (in other words 10^2 x 10^3 = 10^(2+3) ) and it all fell into place.

            But I’m damned if I can understand accounting, which is more like a bizarre foreign language with weird conventions, than mathematics.

          25. Yeah, I love math, but hate accounting and doing tax forms. They seem so illogical, aside from having to pay.

            Logs and trig are such fun. I think a lot of the kids these days don’t recognize the beauty of logs because of just punching everything into a calculator. Proving log identities are something different, but a great brain challenge.

            Bad math joke: God (or somebody) says to the animals, Go forth and multiply. But we’re adders, said the adders…So god invented log tables…

          26. Ugh – accounting. Back when I had to balance my cheque book I always screwed it up. I had to get my mom to fix it. I have my own way of tracking my money and I don’t like their way. 🙂

        2. “But québecois is another thing altogether!”

          Indeed! I often listened to the CBC French service while learning French. The announcers (this was BC) were very easy to understand. But as soon as they brought on a real Québecois guest? Forget it! I couldn’t understand a word of it.

          I remember being amazed by Cuban-Americans that I overheard in Miami, FL: Like you said, they would slip seamlessly between English and Spanish, usually int he same sentence. Very cool.

          I have a Colombian colleague at my current job who does this sometimes too. And, amazingly, I usually understand the Spanish parts!

          1. Re slipping between languages, that seems to be fairly common. I’ve heard it often with Cook Island speakers addressing a local audience, when they come to a concept that’s more easily expressed in English (like say ‘check-in time is 10.30p.m.’) they drop into English for a few words mid-sentence then back to Rarotongan. The wife and her sister are chatting on the verandah right now and a quick listen suggests they’re using about 5% English.

            The Quebecois, now… more french than the French. I had a charming French teacher (i.e. she was French) for evening classes last year, and ‘except in Canada’ was a sort of standing joke in respect of borrowings like ‘le weekend’.

          2. Quebec is the only place where the stop sign doesn’t say “stop”. Well not the only place but even France doesn’t have an Arret sign.

          3. Yes, I was reconnoitring my route out of Lyons (from the comfort of my armchair in NZ, for my first venture into France or driving on the right, I had a rental car booked from Lyons TGV station) using Google Streetview, and noting ‘keep ahead at the traffic lights, ahead all the way to the junction, right at the Stop sign, keep ahead until… WHAAA?’ I had to back up Streetview and look again to make sure I hadn’t imagined it. I’m still slightly amazed and amused that France uses ‘Stop’ signs.

            I’ve just been looking at the Vesubie-Mercantour regional tourist pages and I’m quite certain the Quebecois would never tolerate such Franglais barbarisms as ‘Cliquez’, ‘Flashez’ and ‘Zoomez’ 😉

          4. Even Russia has stop signs in cyrillic. I noticed this looking at Russian dash cam footage on YouTube. I saw the sign, sounded it out & laughed because of Quebec.

        3. You should take classes at the Goethe Institute in Toronto. I would if I could get there easily.

          1. I managed to convince the Goethe Institute to send me some great DVDs of a series on Thomas Mann and family called Die Manns. A friend in Germany had lent them to me sans ( ohne) subtitles and I figured I got maybe 60-75% of it. Then I heard that the Goethe Institute had subtitled versions, but only for teachers. I called them up, said I was a teacher, didn’t mention that it was Math I taught, and they sent me the disks for free c/o my school:-)

      2. Your mother-in-law is Jean Chrétien? No one understood him in either language. 🙂 here is a video of him speaking with W. Chrétien speaks at 2:39. He is ok here; usually he said more amusing things but it always amuses me to see out PMs warn US presidents that they’re going to speak French now. As if, the Americans will explode or something if a warning isn’t given.

          1. I haven’t. Like a true Canadian, I assumed it was bad because it was Canadian.

    1. I think so. At least being educated in French in Canada I was always told to err on the side of vous. I’m sure it makes you stand out as a square headed anglophone though.

      2. I was told to call everyone in Quebec “tu” except members of the Surete de Quebec (no accents…)

    3. I’m not a French Canadian, but I did grow up in Montreal, so I do have some perspective.

      Answer: Yes, and it was somewhat awkward as a second-language speaker. I remember wondering what to do about BBS sysops/cosysops. (!)

      Incidentally, there’s another piece of “god grammar” in French – prayers are in the subjunctive.

  18. Oh my gosh, I have literally LOL’d! This is great.

    My husband always makes fun of me if I speak French because I’m from North Carolina and when I speak French, it’s apparently the only time I sound like I have a southern accent.

    I guess my teacher screwed my accent up in high school 🙁

  20. French (+Spanish, Italian etc) comes from Latin, which sticks to singular and plural and doesn’t worry about familiarity etc. Much easier. Funny how they’re closer to Latin than English, but it’s English, otherwise so complicated, that’s adopted the simpler rule.

    1. Then there was my Quaker grandfather, who say thee (never thou) to all his friends.

      Hilarious chart. Will pass it on to anglophone friends here in France.

      Btw, after 44 years, I still have trouble with the sexes of nouns and adjectives.

  21. We were cycling in Alsace this summer and stopped to consult the map. A man came up and offered to give us directions, and on hearing my first attempt to respond, asked “Deutsch?” I replied “Americain,” and he sighed. But we got on with the little German I remembered.

    When trying to speak French I am in mortal fear of inadvertently insulting someone, e.g., by asking a woman if she’s a prostitute, when all I want to know is whether the shop is open.

    1. I once asked a waitress for the wrong kind of napkin, or so I was later told. She was amused.

      What is really funny is that this took place in merry old England. Languages so close, and yet different enough for much confusion.

    2. Or announcing you’re pregnsnt when you want to say your full or saying your horny when you want to say you feel hot or ordering a prostitute instead of fries with gravy and cheese curds (that one usually just happens in Canada).

        1. (not meant to be a reply, though I was wondering earlier how to order the fries)

  22. As I understand it — and correct me if I’m wrong, English used to have familiar and formal words as well. And just as in French, the familiar were used with God: Thee/Thine/Thou.

    Over time, the perception changed, the familiar form became a reverent, respectful form used exclusively with God and the formal You/Your/You became familiar and used with everyone.

    1. ‘You’ is officially a plural pronoun and ‘Thou’is singular.
      If addressing one French child use ‘tu’ but if more than one use’vous’.

  23. It’s a similar story with Dutch. Not so very long ago some Dutch people were so formal that children were even required to use the polite form (“U”) to their parents! By the late 1980’s the situation was close to that given in the chart here, and now U is used even less. You can’t forget the U form yet – I suspect it would be unwise to use “jij” to police or customs officials for example. But in most situations U is used so little that even asking someone whether it’s all right to use jij comes over as distinctly formal.

    1. True that, but if I’m thinking of myself addressing a customs officer that is ten years younger than myself… I would use “je /jij” even there.

      I only use U for people that are a generation older than myself and perhaps i would (not sure because i never am 😁) in a situation of “proper authority “, say, king, prime minister, judge.

    2. In Flemish (i.e. Flanders-specific Dutch), things get slightly more complicated than in Dutch in general:
      ‘U’: very polite
      ‘jij’: somewhat polite, or familiar
      ‘gij’: always familiar

      Generally speaking, unless you’re talking to someone who, in English, you’d address with Sir/Madam, ‘jij’ is typically safe, but can come across as overly stiff is certain situations.

  24. I was just thinking about this the other day about English. A young friend of mine, about 25, was going to work with an older acquaintance, who was about 70. My friend was fretting that he had forgotten the older person’s last name and I was puzzled about why he cared, when I suddenly got it. “Call him Jerry”, I said, using the older guy’s first name. “He’s going to be your peer.” I remember experiencing the same anxiety when I first graduated college.

    A few years ago, my bank tellers suddenly became interested in my first name and awkwardly attempted a friendly, chatty relationship. It was really awkward and I found that I really didn’t like the familiarity. I wasn’t the only one, because a few weeks later, they had gone back to “Mr.”

    In other scenarios, I don’t want people to call me “Mr.” because it is distancing. I even want children to use my first name and I hate hearing “sir” at the end of sentences. Forcing people to use these titles is a form of intimidation and it doesn’t flatter my ego to hear them. In the working world today, referring to anyone in your hierarchy as “Mr.” is almost unheard of. The oddity of it struck me the other day when a tradesman working at my home referred to his boss as “Mr. ….” and it sounded very obsequious.

    Forcing one group of people to use titles when referring to another group is a form of power, so refusing to comply is a way to put equality back into the relationship. One exception I’d make is in addressing an officer of the law; it strikes me as useful to send them a message of compliance.

    1. I find Americans much more formal in this. The way they use “sir” and “madam” and address people by their job titles (even long after they’ve left the job) sounds overly formal to a NZer. I would call the Prime Minister Mr Key, but if we were ever having a private conversation, which in NZ isn’t unlikely for anybody, I would expect him to say, “Call me John,” even though I’m nobody.

      People sometimes ask if it’s OK to use your first name in formal situations. As a woman, I prefer it, because all the Miss/Ms/Mrs thing really annoys me.

      2. I think Americans are pretty informal in most situations as well. Perhaps this varies by regions. The President thing is just a perk title arrangement. They also get to have scary body guard guys after retirement. Canadians only just started thinking maybe it’s a good idea to have our PM guarded. Meh, they usually fend for themselves; Chrétien choked that guy so…..

      3. ” The way they use “sir” and “madam” and address people by their job titles (even long after they’ve left the job) sounds overly formal to a NZer. ”

        I’d be surprised to hear “madam”, although “m’am” wouldn’t be unusual. And “Miss” is very antiquated. I use “sir” often to people who are operating at a social station beneath me to convey respect; to children, for instance, or the person working behind the fast food counter. I once used it with someone much older than I was and he was quick to say “don’t call me sir”, even though I didn’t mean it in that way.

        People here are too respectful towards some titles…medical doctors, for instance. People almost always refer to their doctor as “Dr. ….”. I make it a point to use the first name. It’s ironic that our society would be this way, considering that we take considerable (false) pride in being so egalitarian.

        There has been a marked decrease most types of formality in the past 30 years…when I first started my career, I wore a business suit, but now you only see that amongst bankers and lawyers.

        1. Sometimes I think that reverence is a social stratification thing. I find my working class brethren to be more respectful of doctors, etc. where white collar jerks like me challenge them. 🙂

        2. About the only people who call me ‘sir’ are traffic cops. I can’t say I like it much (usually because of the context…)

          I find it perfectly normal and acceptable not to use any title at all when addressing people or being addressed. Normal politeness like ‘please’ and ‘thankyou’ is all that’s needed. (And I manage to fudge around using names because I’m crap at remembering names and terrified of getting it worng…)

          1. I used to say “individual”. I realized it sounded cold but it’s hard to deal with this stuff.

        3. I think it’s partly geographical, as well. I grew up in Pennsylvania and Maryland, and the only time children called adults sir or ma’am was when they were being sarcastic. Right out of college I moved down to Texas, and that’s what they teach the kids in school. (One time I actually told my daughter not to ‘take that tone with me’ when she called me sir, because I was so used to it being strictly sarcastic, when she was just trying to be polite.)

          I’ve also noticed the transition to familiarity it at restaurants when they ask for your name to put it on the waiting list. I still give my last name because I just don’t know them well enough to be on a first name basis, but it seems I’m one of the few people to do that (and since my last name sounds like a first name, they usually right it down as Louis or Luiz).

    2. Has anyone noticed the use of “we” by young restaurant servers? Such as What will we be having? I usually say, I don’t know about you, but I’ll have the lamb…My youngish new family doctor, when talking about booking my recent routine colonoscopy, used we, and I asked if he was planning to join me:-)

        1. As for “overly familiar,” what I dislike is waitresses, including teenagers, calling me “Honey.” “What can I get ya, Honey?” This is so common that I wonder if they are told to do this in their training.

          When my father was in his 80’s, waitresses would address him as “Young Man.” “And what would you like, Young Man?” He HATED this. If anyone is under the impression that this is ingratiating, it isn’t.

          1. Partner that wil kneeling down and writing their name backwards on stuff and they are just getting too damn fancy.

          2. They might have been reading this:
            http://www.tipping.org/tips/megatips.pdf

            Both of those things have been demonstrated to increase tips on average. Even simple things like waitresses wearing a flower in their hair, or even using tip trays that have credit card insignias on them tend to increase the tips.

          3. Ugh. If they touched me, I’d be irritated. I find it rude for someone I don’t know to touch me.

          4. Yeah, I don’t like to be touched, either. And I really dislike it when a waiter sits down at the table with us to take an order. But apparently that’s what gets them the bigger tips on average, so as long as tips remain the dominant way to pay servers, those behaviors will continue.

        3. The phoniness is what bothers me in mundane business transactions like those involving Merilee’s server or Greg’s bank teller. All I can think about when see I e providers do this with me is the series of meetings that must’ve taken place at HQ wherein several mucketymucks contrived this bread-and-circuses style customer-handling tactic and then say back all smug-like, patting themselves on the back for thinking they put something worthwhile into action. Like the WalMart greeter. I don’t need a person to welcome me or to say goodbye. What I need is a store that treats its employees well, maintains cleanliness, keeps its stock organized, and makes sure employees can answer basic questions about store layout etc. WalMart is none if those things. But they have a greeter! Almost pulled the wool over my eyes! Not!

          Here endeth the rant.

          4. We had a really full-of-himself (for no reason) annoying guy in one of our fitness classes, who was always pettily complaining about what everyone else did. In fact he’s the first person I ever actually told to f-off to his face (and many people applauded. He was shocked, because I usually come across as fairly “lady-like”.) Anyway, when he retired he became a Wal-Mart greeter. Our fitness instructor ran into him there and said “Mike, I thought you had to be nice to be a greeter!” I totally agree that greeters, nice or not, are not an asset. But then I rarely shop at Wal-mart. I also hate all the preliminaries in service phone calls. I often say “Please cut to the chase.” Of course some have no idea what I’m talking about…

          5. Ha ha! My former high school German teacher (who I still know) fantasized about being a Walmart greeter. He is retired now and was working in Chapters for a while but I think is for realz retired now.

          6. I stopped shopping at Walmart probably about 15 years ago. I found the way they bully local governments distasteful and their union busting activities just as bad so I just refused to go there anymore. Also, every time I went there, my fellow shoppers annoyed me somehow.

          7. I don’t like giving them business, either.

            I wind up shopping at WM a few times a year, for various reasons, which include, I’m ashamed to admit, convenience. It’s on the way home.

          8. I don’t think I’ve ever set foot in one save when dragged there by somebody else, and never spent any money there myself. No desire to change that for so many reasons.

            b&

          9. I maybe go to a Wal-mart once a year on average, only when it’s the last possible resort. I do not want to appear to be supporting policies that I think are cruel, contemptible, and purely avaricious.

          10. Maybe I’m just cynical, but I never thought the greeters’ main job was greeting. I always thought their main job was keeping an eye out for shoplifters, and that the greeting was just secondary, to make them seem a bit friendlier and less like a security guard.

          11. That could be, but I kind of doubt it. The magnetic sensors do a much better job of discerning when someone is walking out without having been through checkout, and if the greeter’s job is to then apprehend that person, I don’t think you’d see so many elderly greeters. I think the WM bigwigs are under the impression they’ve successfully polished their turd.

          12. Oh dear. Because I would have found the greeter much more acceptable if they had been doubling as a security guard – it would mean they had a legitimate function which someone had thought of making a little less intimidating by having them greet people. But as ‘greeters’ solely, their job strikes me as a bit of meaningless corporate insincerity.

            I’m just too cynical, I’m afraid.

      2. What I call “medico-paternalism”. It exists also in french: “Comment allons-nous ce matin ?”. I simply hate that. Luckily it is disappearing progressively.

        1. My youngish and very nice female vet uses it too. We’re going to need our nails trimmed, etc. i’m not smart-assed enough to ask if she’s going to trim her own nails along with my dog’s. I know that I’m not part of the we.

      3. If anybody says ‘we’ in that fashion, it reminds me of the way children used to be addressed by adults. “We’re going to the zoo, won’t that be nice for us?”
        This includes speakers at courses who say things like “We’ll be finding out the importance of blah blah blah…” – immediately brings out my sarcastic streak, I’m sorry to say.

    3. I learned from the Kleine Duden grammar that Sie (cognate ‘they’) was a relatively recent replacement for the original polite plural Ihr (equivalent to French vous or English you, but now used as singular only for deliberate archaic flavour in historic and fantasy settings, like thou/thee/thine in English). It would be interesting to know how this (obviously repugnant*) change came about, i.e. where started and how spread, but most discussions of the subject are only in terms of ‘correct’ usage or current trends rather than historical explanation.
      (*How do you feel about being addressed as ‘they’? Distanced, depersonalised? This is ‘politeness’ in the same sense that freßen is the Höflichkeitsform of eßen.)

  25. The classic work on this across different languages is Roger Brown and Alfred Gilman’s paper: http://mapageweb.umontreal.ca/tuitekj/cours/2611pdf/Brown-Gilman-Pronouns.pdf

    Note that the French spoken in Quebec is a bit more egalitarian, where the use of “vous” in some contexts may be considered impolite or snobbish.

    I learned Brazilian Portuguese in São Paulo, where “você” is used in all contexts and to all speakers. But when I went to northeastern Brazil a couple of years ago, I was surprised at how many people there use “tu”.

    1. Thanks for that article! Looking forward to reading it. I took one quarter of Brazilisn Portuguese, just enough to understand the bossa nova lyrics. It’s written a lot like Spanish and Italian, but much different pronunciation. Lots of sh sounds, especially the Portugal and Azores version.

          1. Or Spanish and German. Lots of guttural sounds. I think the Brazilian is a little less so. And Rio is pronounced kind of Hio.

          4. Yup, that’s right, the o is an oo. And de is pronounced sort of gee. Languages are such fun!

            I get such a kick out of Northern English soccer commentator Ray Hudson with all his wooonderfuls. He gets so excited, especially during the last game we saw where Barça tied Atletico Madric. I thought he might burst a gut with all his enthusiasm;-) He also says magisterial a lot, but no oo sounds there…

          5. Linguists report (as I understand) that the speed is actually due to unfamiliarity with the sounds of the language. Speech is normally continuous for long periods accoustically and our brain’s semantic-level signal processing does the rest.

          9. Let me be more precise: They talk like molasses in February EVERY month of the year;-) I know, I live with one;-)

        2. I recently met a few people from Brazil, and one I could understand almost perfectly when he was speaking Portuguese, while I could hardly understand the others at all. Turns out the one I could understand was originally from a different South American country where they spoke Spanish (I’m nearly fluent in Spanish after a week or two in a Spanish speaking country).

          It reminds me of something I read once, that non-native English speakers can understand each other more easily than they can native English speakers, even if the non-native speakers have different native tongues themselves (e.g. a German and a Spaniard).

          1. That is quite possibly so, I suspect the non-native English speakers pronounce words more like the way they are written – more ‘correctly’ in fact – where the native English speakers (like all native speakers) are rather sloppy. Similarly I’ve found, listening to native French speakers, my biggest problem is not in knowing what the words mean (I’m getting fairly good at that), but in figuring out what words they’re actually saying.

    2. “Note that the French spoken in Quebec is a bit more egalitarian, where the use of “vous” in some contexts may be considered impolite or snobbish.”

      Indeed. “Vous” applies to people older than you are, teachers and professional/business encounters.

      In Quebec, the vouvoyeur (correct verbs “vouvoyer” and “tutoyer”) usually quickly offers to tutoyer and it would be considered extremely rude to decline. In the Chirrac-Mitterand exchange, it was not Chirrac’s perogative to offer tutoiement in the first place.

  26. As others have pointed out, the German language has the same distinction with Sie/Du.

    There’s an anecdote, most probably apocryphal, about former chancellor of Germany Helmut Kohl offering Ronald Reagan: “You can say you to me.”

  27. Formal vs Informal was what I was taught. It covers pretty much all the bases…

    Apart from the God bit. Didn’t learn to pray in French!

  28. Actually that chart isn’t complex enough. In some circles, for instance, people generally vouvoient (use vous) their parents and spouses (right wing, nobility or close to it). Others find it mighty sexy to vouvoyer a lover.
    There are endless discussions among translators about using “vous” and “tu” in French translations of English language texts.

  29. I just use ‘vous’. Along with ignoring the gender of things, I figure my French is so terrible that’s the least of my problems.

    It isn’t only French that has problems. I invariably run into problems when writing formal letters to females. Mrs/Miss/Ms? ‘Dear Madam’? – ouch.

    My wife, who is a Pacific Islander – most Polynesian languages do NOT have gendered pronouns, or for that matter gender-specific names – just uses ‘he / she’ and ‘him / her’ interchangeably, with sometimes disconcerting results – “Tere just got married, she’s bringing her wife to meet us” “Yes dear – what?” I find it rather charming.

    1. My Indonesian friend mixes up her pronouns like that, referring to men as “she”, before correcting herself.

      Just go with “lady”. Dear lady,

      🙂 often Italians would call me that. I think they figured they were being polite and I found it kind of endearing.

      1. My Azorean cleaning lady generally uses she or you when in doubt. My son-in-law you said…Or my son-in-law she….Don’t think that’s typical Portuguese.

      2. I think, for some obscure reason, ‘Dear lady’ might be considered to be a little bit patronising and hence cause offence. ‘Lady’ seems a little bit old-fashioned and possibly for that reason carries traces of condescension – a sort of implication that ‘ladies’ are delicate creatures. Maybe I’m reading too much into it.

        Of course coming from a foreigner (e.g. Italians) one usually makes allowances.

        ‘Dear Madam’ always sounds to me like they’re running a brothel, but that’s probably just my regrettable mindset. 🙁

        1. I know, I was being a smart ass. No one should really take my ?English advice seriously. Usually I recommend the funniest solution.

  30. As if having two forms isn’t complicated enough, Flemish (technically Dutch but still quite distinct) uses three different forms of address:
    Je/jij
    Ge/gij
    And U.

    Being Dutch i have no real clue when they use which, apart from that U is the politest form. It took me a year to get a Flemish friend of mine to stop addressing me in the formal and tu-toie me 😮.

    1. @marvol19

      I just now added a small explanation as a reply to Stephen P’s comment (I’m Flemish). Your comment however made me realize that there is a further complication: in some cases ‘u’ (not U) is seen as the more familiar form, as compared to ‘je’. This applies to “Kan ik u iets vragen?” versus “Kan ik je iets vragen?” as well as the possessive forms “uw gsm” versus “je/jouw gsm” (in both situations, the first is the more familiar of the two).

      I suppose (though I’m not sure) that the origin of this peculiarity might lie with ‘u’/’uw’ being related to ‘gij’, which used to be the more polite form, but at some point seems to have switched places o_O.

      1. Ack- maybe I need to take on Flemish as my next challenge. For starters, how in the world do you pronounce “gsm”, or is it an abbreviation?

        OT: i’ve listened to most of the first week of lectures of Jerry’s buddy Mohammed Noor’s Genetics course from Duke. What a great lecturer!!

        1. yeah ‘gsm’ is an abbreviation (though no doubt there are languages where that would be seen as an entirely pronounceable word).

          2. gsm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM

            It’s the ‘other’ cellphone network standard, which is the one that is most used (if not the only one used) in Europe. Early on, the term ‘gsm’ became synonymous for mobile phone / cellphone (at least in Flanders).

          4. You’re learning Flemish? Quite brave of you o_O. I hope it isn’t just a hobby, otherwise I’d have to conclude you’re masochistic, or ill informed >.< :-).

  31. That’s quite a complicated chart for a simple concept.

    “Tu” is familiar, “vous” is formal. End of it.

      1. I live in France with my dear French wife and what Phil says is a huge oversimplification. It depends on your age, the age of the person you are addressing, where you are in France, whether the person has annoyed you or you wish to insult them (use tu), also animals, dogs normally, are tu-ed. I asked my wife whether one speaks to God as tu, but she gave that lot up years ago so thank God for that.

      2. This is true, of course, but the point is that what counts as familiar and formal is complicated, to say the least.

        (At least it isn’t Japanese, which I understand is far more so.)

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