Colombia's Special Word for "You"(nytimes.com) |
Colombia's Special Word for "You"(nytimes.com) |
The article is reading way too much into it, and it forgets a very important piece of information: The origin of usted is "vuestra merced". Spanish had T-V distinction, like most romance languages, but usted superceded vos as the formal 2nd person pronoun.
sumercé is a word that had the same process, just starting from "su merced" instead, since in Colombia —like in all other latin american countries— vosotros is not used.
That's it.
Which in some Brazilian soap operas sounded more like "vosmece" or "vosmercê", especially when said by people with country side accent (caipiras).
Weirdly enough, some colombians seem to despise this word or look down on us who use it.
Everyone everywhere is looking for excuses to put other people down, I guess.
The Spanish page has more information → https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cundinamarca
That would seem not so odd, being ustedes the plural form of formal "you" usted, if not because ustedes should match "they" in verbal forms, while in fact it match plural "you". So no "ustedes saben" but "ustedes sabéis".
Even usted/ustedes is fading away, TV is so powerful. But I still hear that when back there for holidays.
That is a very-very small number of people to write such an article, haha.
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Should be illegal
For example, a university course I took tested for the proper conjugation of verbs with "vosotros/as" (with its typical usage in Spain). But I later read about some debate over why the usage of vosotros/as was tested, but not the usage of voseo (vos for the singular instead of tú), despite its usage being common in large parts of Latin America.
Some textbooks for language learners treat voseo by including it in the conjugation tables just for awareness, but not testing this in the exercises. Your hometown's usage of "ustedes" is quite interesting, and it would be great to see it documented in a learner's textbook somewhere, to further reflect the diversity of the language.
As a person who learned Spanish as a foreign language, let me assure you that none of this matters.
What matters is learning the language well enough to communicate without causing too much strain on the other person. If you can achieve this with a foreign language everyone will be really impressed and will understand if you learned one variant instead of another.
This link to the Spanish Real Academia web shows a verb conjugation (scroll down):
https://dle.rae.es/hablar?m=form
It includes the usted,vos forms.
The oddity is that this use of "ustedes" (only in plural, not for "usted") uses the verbal form for "you all" instead of the verbal form for "they", so it's weird for people from other parts of the country.
As for the use of "usted" in general, it's declining, specially in urban areas.
A useful aspect of the language that I was required to learn was a stricter focus on grammar. I got away for a while with a weaker understanding for verb conjugations during conversation, but the courses required me to learn this thoroughly. Though this wasn't necessary for general communication, this helped with preparation for a professional language assessment and for formal communications.
However, a less useful aspect that didn't matter much to my communication abilities came from taking a course on pronunciation. Though learning the pronunciation rules for the first two thirds was helpful for reducing my foreign accent, the last third required a couple assessments that heavily weighted students' abilities to identify the regional accent of a speaker (e.g. identifying between accents that were Andalusian versus Rioplatense versus Chilean). While there is arguably some value with identifying a speaker's accent from an interview or film, this took a lot of time that I could have spent learning other aspects of the language, and I wish this skill would've been optional to learn.
So, you've hit on one of the downsides of learning Spanish in a formal environment via inflexible expectations of learning goals, though I did find upsides too (that said, a motivated self-learner could absolutely learn grammar on their own—though a classroom environment does provide a nice motivation).
which centuries are we talking about?
> It helps that written Spanish has been particularly well documented from the Age of Discovery onwards.
and that was how many centuries after the Arab occupation?
There are tons of Arabic-origin words in Spanish, (alcoba, aljibe, almohada, cerveza, naranja, zanahoria), so the hypothesis of "usted" sharing said origin is plausible.
Maybe you have some relevant evidence to your theory?
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.academia.edu/491578...
Evidence for "vuestra merced":
http://elies.rediris.es/elies22/cap7.htm
Much more in-depth treatment of "vuestra merced" etymology:
www.academia.edu/39806097/_Fue_vulgar_y_plebeyo_el_origen_de_usted_La_diacron%25C3%25ADa_del_pronombre_de_respeto_desde_la_interfaz_oral_escrito&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwjc_-qd9tuEAxXFOjQIHWgZDMsQFnoECAYQAg&usg=AOvVaw1A_5QRn5k5EbDqDOzJ-DUy
Spanish Corpus:
https://www.corpusdelespanol.org/hist-gen/
Interesting review of dialects of Judeo-Spanish from 1894 where "su merced", "su osted", and "usted" all appear:
https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/la-lengua-y-la-l...
Argentinian Voseo is using the pronoun but not the majestic plural. Instead they create a brand new form, altering the accent. I had no idea that it was so extended outside Argentina. That surprises me because I know people from many of the relevant countries and had not heard any of them using it, except Argentinians.