• amio@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Japanese does this, and doesn’t half-ass it either! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronouns_in_Japanese#List_of_Japanese_personal_pronouns

    Hell, Japanese essentially has entire modes of speaking just to be polite, with whole sets of pronouns, verbs and speaking style. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorific_speech_in_Japanese

    Incidentally, from a Euro perspective, tons of “our” languages, and formerly English (thou/thee) have what is called a t-v distinction, named after Latin “you” (tu/vi) which depends on status much like “usted” in Spanish. There’s a list of languages which do this.

    • Uruanna@lemmy.world
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      24 hours ago

      Just to be clear, the Wikipedia list is simply trying to be exhaustive and points out which ones are a matter of dialect and what’s just an archaic form. Think of it like a list that includes you, ye, ya, y’all, u, thou. Those are not different pronouns - it’s the same word with variations for regions, time periods, medium. Don’t take “you can just write ‘u’ when you are writing on an electronic device” as a formal rule.