Apart from training your vocabulary, at times Inglua also throws short sentences your way. No Joycean prose, alas, or anything that could plausibly appear in a poem.
Just sentences like “I wash the cat”or “All spiders like some fat flies.”.
Or like “You blush.”. And that brings us to today’s problem.
You see, although (dost thou remember?) English used to make a distinction between formal and informal modes of addressing people, the “thou” form was already disappearing during Shakespeare’s time, and is now completely gone, except in some British dialects.
And there’s no distinction between the singular and the plural in the second person either. The rule is simple: The second person is always “you”.
However, it’s more complicated in other languages. In French, it’s always “vous”, with one exception: the singular informal, which is “tu”.
German and Dutch also distinguish between informal plural (you guys, y’all) and the formal forms. German uses “ihr” and “Sie”, while Dutch uses “jullie” and “u”.
Spanish has the most forms: tú, usted, vosotros (and vosotras for feminine subjects!). But in Spanish they’re usually optional.
So if we ask you to translate “you blush”, you’ll have a problem, regardless of which language you’re learning.
For French, should you translate this with “tu rougis” or “vous rougissez”? And for Spanish, you’d have as much as five options.
We could solve this by adding some context (”Sir, you blush!”) but that would look fairly unnatural. So we’ve decided to annotate the questions. We’ll ask “You(formal) blush”, and you’ll have enough information to decide between “tu” and “vous” (but not between “usted” and “ustedes”).
But we only supply these annotations when they’re needed, since, frankly, they’re ugly. That means that French people learning English will never see “Vous(informal) rougissez”.
Why not? “It’s always you.”
