Fromvuestra merced (lit. "your mercy" (etymological) or "your grace" (idiomatic)), an honorific style.[1] In 17th-century Spanish, there were a number of variants, including the intermediate formsvuesasted andvusted. Cf.Portuguesevocê,Galicianvostede,Catalanvostè,Asturianvusté andSardinianbostè. The following list has the variants reported by Coromines and Pascual,[2] with their reported first year of attestation:
Early modern variants
- bosanzé, 1620 (Lope de Vega,Pedro Carbonero, portrayed as said by (ex-)Muslims)
- boxanxé, ca. 1631 (Quevedo,Libro de todas las cosas y otras muchas más, portrayed as said by (ex-)Muslims)
- usted, 1620
- voarced, 1635
- voazé, 1625 (Vélez de Guevara,El Rey en su imagen, portrayed as criminal cant)
- vuarced, ca. 1630
- vuasted, 1617
- vucé, 1626
- vuesarced, 1621
- vuesasted, 1597
- vuested, 1635
- vusté (in Quiñones de Benavente, died 1651)
- vusted, 1619
Despite similar phonetics, semantics, and plausible chronology, most likely unrelated toArabicأستاذ(ustād), which is ultimately from a different Indo-European root (via borrowing from Persian into Arabic).
- IPA(key): /usˈted/[usˈt̪eð̞]
- Rhymes:-ed
- Syllabification:us‧ted
usted m orfby sense (pluralustedes)
- (formal)second person formal;you (singular)
- Synonyms:tú,vos,vuestra merced,vusted,vuesarced,vuesasted,vuestra señoría
- (Costa Rica, Colombia, chiefly Bogotá)second person informal;you (singular)
- (in theplural, Latin America, Canary Islands, Western Andalusia, informal, familiar)you
- Functionally,usted andustedes are second person pronouns, but grammatically, the verbs they govern are conjugated in the third person. (This is the same distinction as seen in English with the difference between "You are welcome to stay here longer" but "Your Excellency is welcome to stay here longer.") InAndalusia,ustedes uses the forms associated withvosotros. SeeAppendix:Spanish pronouns for details. CompareSanskritभवत्(bhávat).
- Like other masculine words, masculine pronouns can be used when the gender of the subject is unknown or when the subject is plural and of mixed gender.
- Treated as if it were third person for purposes of conjugation and reflexivity.
- Ifle orles precedeslo,la,los, orlas in a clause, it is replaced withse (e.g.se lo dije instead of*le lo dije).
- Used primarily in Spain.
- Used only in rare circumstances.
- ^de Gonge, Bob (2005), “El desarrollo de las variantes de vuestra merced a usted”, inActas del II Congreso de la Región Noroeste de Europa de la Asociación de Lingüística y Filología de América Latina (ALFAL),ISSN 1139-8736
- ^Coromines, Joan;Pascual, José Antonio (1983), “usted”, inDiccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico [Critical Castilian and Hispanic etymological dictionary][1] (in Spanish), volume V (Ri–X), Madrid: Gredos,→ISBN, page844
