“du” inMartalar, Umberto Martello; Bellotto, Alfonso (1974),Dizionario della lingua Cimbra dei Sette Communi vicentini, 1st edition, Roana, Italy: Instituto di Cultura Cimbra A. Dal Pozzo
Du was already falling out of general use in early modern Dutch. It was still relatively common in the oblique cases, in vocatives or close to vocative appositions and when indicating contempt.
The corresponding verbal ending was-st. The present form ofzijn wasbist, forhebben the present formshebst andhest were in use. When the nominative directly followed the verb, contraction usually occurred:-stu;bistu,hebstu.
Only used before nouns (or nominalized forms of other parts of speech, most often adjectives) that begin with consonants; before vowel-initial words, the formde l' is used, e.g., as seen above,de l'imparfait.
The partitive article is used withuncountable nouns instead of the indefinite article (which is only used with countable nouns). English and most other European languages do not use any article in such cases.
Like the indefinite article, the partitive article becomes simplede with grammatical objects in negated sentences:Il ne mange pasde pain.(“He doesn't eat bread.”)
After the actual prepositionde(“of, from”), the partitive article is deleted. So one can never say*de du or*de de la.
After the second person singular verb ending-st, the/d/ is generally lost when the pronoun is unstressed. Thushast du is pronounced[ˈhast‿u] even in purposefully enunciated speech.
In colloquial speech, chiefly of northern and central Germany, the/d/ can be lost after any precedingcoronal. Thuswenn du may be pronounced[ˈvɛn‿u] or[ˈvɛn‿ə].
Du is the informal second person pronoun. In formal speech, the third person pluralSie (always capitalised) is used instead.
A general rule of thumb is thatdu is used to address one's friends, relatives, and those under about 16 years of age.Du is always used to address children and non-human beings.
Usage also depends on the setting: two unacquainted, middle-aged persons are likely to usedu when they meet at social gatherings, but much less so when they happen on each other in the street. People under 30 often usedu among each other, but they still useSie when one of them is at work, e.g. in a shop (some cafés and most pubs are an exception).
There is also a great deal of (often subtle) regional variation throughout the German-speaking world.
Transcriptions of Mandarin into the Latin script often do not distinguish between the criticaltonal differences employed in the Mandarin language, using words such as this one without indication of tone.
The distinction of the formssiu andsie as shown above is typical of earlierUpper German texts, but was never general. The formssī andsi existed additionally and all four were increasingly used without differentiation.
Bill Palmer,The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area (→ISBN, 2017), page 531, table 95,Comparative basic vocabulary in Lakes Plain Languages
Some speakers ofOld High German appear to have contrasted the "polite" singular (plural forms) with the regular, informal singular (singular forms), as inNew High German (Modern German)Sie versusdu. This distinction is however not well-attested, and may have been regional, genre-dependent, or only in Late Old High German.
^Norval Smith (2009), “A preliminary list of probable Gbe lexical items in the Surinam Creoles”, inP. Muysken, N. Smith, editors,Surviving the Middle Passage: The West Africa-Surinam Sprachbund, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton,→ISBN, page465
Det finns bara en av mig och det är jag. Det finns bara en av dig och det ärdu. Det finns bara två av oss, och det är vi.
There is only one of me and that is I. There is only one of you [object] and that isyou [subject]. There are only two of us, and that is us [we – subject]. [Swedish has some of the same subject/object fuzziness as English, but a standalone "Det är <pronoun>" idiomatically (through intuition rather than being taught) uses the subject form]
Vargen ylar i nattens skog. Han vill men kan inte sova. Hungern river hans vargabuk, och det är kallt i hans stova.Du varg,du varg, kom inte hit. Ungen min får du aldrig.
The wolf howls in the forest of the night. He wants to sleep but cannot. ["He wants to but cannot sleep" – "He wants to X" is "Han vill X"] [The] hunger tears his wolf belly, and it is cold in hisstove [archaic, dialectal, in the dated English sense].Hey wolf,hey wolf, do not come [to] here [hither]. My child you will never have.
Hey, [you shall] stay away from my hamster [with an aggressive and somewhat threatening tone]
– Varför gör han det inte bara? –Ja du, vem vet? /Ja du, det är en bra fråga.
– Why doesn't he just do it? –Yeah, who knows? /Yeah, that's a good question. [with thedu acknowledging the question, adding a confounded tone]
Nej du, så lätt slipper du inte undan!
Oh no, you're not getting away that easily! [Compare the change in tone between "No, you're not getting away that easily!" and "No, dragon, you're not getting away that easily!"]
Whiledu is the traditionally familiar mode of address, it is since the early '70s the standard in almost all circumstances, possibly capitalized in formal communications. This was the result of the so-calleddu-reformen.
Recently, use of the second-person plural pronounni as a less familiar (and thus more formal) pronoun has appeared to some extent, but mainly amongst shopkeepers towards customers.
The same pronounni has also been used historically as a formal way of address, but its use has (in particular in Sweden, not so much in Swedish-speaking parts of Finland) been restricted to addressing people of lower social status, whereby a plethora of different constructions were employed as to avoid the issue of pronouns whatsoever. See also the article aboutT-V distinction in Wikipedia.
D. G. Lewis, N. Lewis, editors (2005–present), “du”, inGweiadur: the Welsh–English Dictionary, Gwerin
R. J. Thomas, G. A. Bevan, P. J. Donovan, A. Hawke et al., editors (1950–present), “du”, inGeiriadur Prifysgol Cymru Online (in Welsh), University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh & Celtic Studies
