Comments on Why does German use the third person plural for the second person polite?
Parent
Why does German use the third person plural for the second person polite?
German has three sets of pronouns for the second person: the familiar singular (du), the familiar plural (ihr), and the polite singular or plural (Sie). The polite form is identical with the third person plural, except that the pronouns are capitalized. It's different from the third person feminine singular, which is also "sie" in the nominative but differs in the other cases.
This is a relatively recent development; as far as I can pin it down, it started in the 19th century. In earlier times the second person plural was used for polite address, as in French. My question is how it came to be the way it is now.
Addressing a person with a third-person pronoun seems impersonal and rude to me. In fact, at one time German used the third person singular (er) as the second person for addressing underlings. This occurs, for example, in Hofmannsthal's libretto for the opera Der Rosenkavalier, where it may be an intentional anachronism.
It's also confusing; I've found in my personal experience that it's sometimes hard in conversation to tell whether "Sie" means "you" or "they." Yet the "Sie" form somehow became the preferred form of polite address. What process led to this?
Post
You may be interested in Head, Brian F. (1978). 'Respect Degrees in Pronominal Reference', in Joseph H. Greenberg, Charles A. Ferguson, and Edith A. Moravcsik (eds.), Universals of Human Language, vol. 3: Word Structure. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
On pages 167–171 he discusses use of the third person for address in Amharic, Bemba, Danish, Eastern Pomo, Efatese, German, Harari, Italian, Janger, Kashmiri, Kefa, Lala, Lamba, Norwegian, Nsenga, Sotho, Swedish, Tagalog, and Welamo. Not all of these are like German in that they use a non-singular pronoun; some use a third person singular.
Head also suggests a distinction between languages that only allow the third person when it is endophoric (discourse-bound), as in French Monsieur veut-il?, and languages like German, where the third person can be used in exophoric (discourse-free) contexts as well. In at least German, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Italian, the exophoric use would be derived from the endophoric use. This was at a time that these languages used a third person singular for address. The shift to plural occurred only later in German, Danish, and Norwegian, and did not happen at all in Italian and some forms of Swedish.
So the development would have been:
- Mein Herr, möchtest du ...
- Mein Herr, möchte er ... (endophoric; cf. French Monsieur veut-il)
- Mein Herr, möchten sie ... (shift to plural like in the second person in many other languages)
- Möchten Sie ... (reanalysis of 3PL as polite 2SG leads to exophoric use)
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