Comments
Comment by Michael Tsai:
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English isn’t more colloquial; it’s just that the colloquial and formal forms have the same sound. :-)
In German, capitalization matters. I believe 3rd person “sie” is not capitalized, while 2nd person is. Also, “ihr” is plural, colloquial “you” (and also the possessive “her” and “their”) but “Ihr” is the formal possessive “your” (singular and plural).
Comment by Charles Ross:
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I’m not a language expert by any means, but my understanding is that English used to have similar forms that have simply fallen out of fashion. This is where the Thee, Thou and Thy come from in the King James version of the Bible. I remember hearing an interview some months ago on the Dennis Prager show of a guy who wrote a book on how the KJV came to be, and one of the questions Dennis asked was regarding the use of these words in that version. I can’t say why their use has all but ended. Perhaps anyone interested can find information on the book at Dennis’ web site.
Comment by ssp:
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Michael: When speaking or hearing English, it always feels more colloquial and personal to me than German. While the ‘you’ issue may not be the only thing causing this, I do think it plays a role.
As for capitalisation: Yes and no. It could matter, but it doesn’t really seem to be done consequently anymore. When I went to school I learned that you should capitalise ‘Du’ and ‘Sie’ for addressing people in letters (only). You wouldn’t capitalise ‘ihr’ (unless you believe in royalty, the pope or such things and want to write letters to them). In practice, those rules don’t seem to be stuck to too strictly, so I’m not sure it matters all that much. I just capitalised all of them without thinking too much about it. Probably the ‘ihr’ shouldn’t be capitalised.
You are right about the double meaning of ‘ihr’ as an indicator for possession. I didn’t want to get into that as it’s really a different discussion (perhaps the one about German being deliberately confusing).
Charles: Those forms came to my mind after posting as well. But I don’t know what to make of them either.
Comment by wiberg:
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Hi, “Sie” and “Ihr” only have to be capitalised, if you mean “you” (2. s.) and “your” (2. s.). This is because “sie” means “she” and “ihr” means “her”. So the meaning differs a lot, if you forget capitalising in letters, but you can’t hear a difference at all.
Comment by ssp:
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wiberg – while the facts you state are correct I don’t think the reasons you give are correct. The capital letters aren’t there to make things distinguishable. They’re more a way of expressing politeness.
Notably, in the current (recently ‘renewed’) orthography, none of the pronouns is to be written with a capital letter anymore. And even before the capital letters were only supposed to be used in letters, for addressing people directly.
