orthohawk:What the Sam Hill is wrong with you people?

Hear hear, orthohawk. You are talking sense. People who claim offence if someone uses a word like this in a conversation are being disingenuous. And silly. What do they do when they hear it, stop the conversation and give a mini-lecture about how traumatising it is to be referred to as 'ci'? Come on.

Meanwhile, in the world of English, I was recently on the phone with a telephone company call centre operator, and I was complaining about something they did. I used the word 'you' to refer to the company, or 'your side'. Normal, modern English. However it really infuriated the operator, who, as she grew more agitated over the course of the conversation, started to object to my use of the word 'you', thinking I was talking about her, i.e. 'you singular'. So I had to change 'you' to 'you, meaning the company that you are working for'; I said that phrase a few times before the conversation ended. How annoying. Not offensive, though. Thou has its uses, or had them, at least.

J_Marc:

orthohawk:What the Sam Hill is wrong with you people?

Hear hear, orthohawk. You are talking sense. People who claim offence if someone uses a word like this in a conversation are being disingenuous. And silly. What do they do when they hear it, stop the conversation and give a mini-lecture about how traumatising it is to be referred to as 'ci'? Come on.

Meanwhile, in the world of English, I was recently on the phone with a telephone company call centre operator, and I was complaining about something they did. I used the word 'you' to refer to the company, or 'your side'. Normal, modern English. However it really infuriated the operator, who, as she grew more agitated over the course of the conversation, started to object to my use of the word 'you', thinking I was talking about her, i.e. 'you singular'. So I had to change 'you' to 'you, meaning the company that you are working for'; I said that phrase a few times before the conversation ended. How annoying. Not offensive, though. Thou has its uses, or had them, at least.

Thee is correct; it does have its uses. my original opinion is that "ci is offensive" is entirely the onus of the listener in most cases. Or as Surak (in the Star Trek world) said: There is no offense where none is taken.*

*Edited to add: I found a reference to this idea (with very similar wording) being a Japanese proverb. YMMV.

J_Marc:People who claim offence if someone uses a word like this in a conversation are being disingenuous. And silly. What do they do when they hear it, stop the conversation and give a mini-lecture about how traumatising it is to be referred to as 'ci'? Come on.

It's not really about offense. It's like RiotNrrd said about talking to someone who lacks social graces, who doesn't know how to behave in company, who is standing too close to you, breathing in your face, and invading your space. You judge this person poorly because they don't know how to behave in society.

Ci is, by definition, a singular pronoun, with no connotation of formality. But people who insist on using it for the familiar normally do so to indicate informality - which is not the meaning of the word at all. So if you used it at home with your family, but not in public with people you don't know, this would be incorrect.

The other thing is that some people DO use "ci" (erroneously) to indicate informality. In those cases you might actually feel offended, because you didn't actually give them permission to be this informal with you.

It sounds EXACTLY like someone going around in English with thee and thou. You aren't offended but you think the person talking is really weird and trying to push some kind of agenda. Therefore you find it annoying and intrusive because you can't just have a normal conversation without being called some pronoun.

------------

These are all of the reasons why we only use "vi" in Esperanto. Some languages use singular and plural "you", but many languages also use them to indicate informality, and some Esperanto speakers try to do that too, erroneously. We neatly avoid the entire problem if we only use "vi".

And an issue like the phone company thing can be easily avoided by avoiding a pronoun - you just say "your company" rather than "you", for example. It isn't that hard. I'd rather have a few of these circumstances than spend my life figuring out whether I'd be presumptuous to use the singular with someone, or rude and distant to use the formal.

then tell me how to differentiate in this example.

if there is a group for say 5 people in front of me, and i am saying, 'yall can go eat.' or just 'you can go eat' because if i were to say 'vi povas manĝi' and 'vi povas manĝi', they look an awful lot the exact same, although with the pronoun 'ci' which i was unaware was potentially just for informal situations, i thought it was just singular' then i could say 'ci povas manĝi' and vi povas manĝi'

how do you differentiate between you and yall in a situation where it could be either that you could mean by saying 'vi'?

If you wanted to emphasize that is everyone, you can say "Vi ĉiuj povas manĝi". If you wanted to emphasize that it's one person only, it's "Johano, vi povas manĝi". or two people - "Johano kaj Filipo, vi povas manĝi" or "Vi du povas manĝi", with gesture.

But really, it would be quite rude to announce to a whole group "You can eat" and mean only one person.

I never ever use "y'all" in English so this comes totally naturally to me. We do not have a plural "you" in my dialect of English.

so you essentially need to say y'all..

and i dont have a plural you in my dialect of english either, hence me picking up y'all for simplicities sake

Saying "ci" can not be compared with bad manners because, as you know, it's not a bad manner. You can speak politely saying "ci".
I understood informality is offensive to you? oh and... standing too close is invading? It's interesting, I didn't know there was such a difference between latin and anglo-saxon cultures.

Y'all is pretty much universally recognized, which makes it useful in grammar discussions despite the extra baggage it can carry, depending on the listener's impressions of dialects with the word. Other dialects have other means to do the same thing, though. I would never use y'all in normal, day-to-day speech...but I frequently make use of "you guys" for the same meaning, regardless of the genders involved. Depending on the context of the conversation, I've also been known to say "you people" and "you folks", as well as just "you" followed by a number. As with "y'all"/"vi ĉiuj", I'm betting these would all work in Esperanto too, more or less.

"Vi uloj" = "You guys"

In your telemarketer example, I imagine I would've used "you guys" and/or "you people" a lot.

What I'm curious about, though, is the singular. How might you better distinguish the singular, aside from comparing it to the plural? Resorting to "John, you can eat" does make the singular clear, but adding the name almost defeats the purpose of using a pronoun in the first place. If "vi ĉiuj" is clearly plural, what vi-construction is clearly singular? In English, all I can think of at the moment is relying on context, and when that fails, using elaborate pronoun-defeating circumlocutions.

Djino:Saying "ci" can not be compared with bad manners because, as you know, it's not a bad manner. You can speak politely saying "ci".
I understood informality is offensive to you? oh and... standing too close is invading? It's interesting, I didn't know there was such a difference between latin and anglo-saxon cultures.

That is precisely the idea at the heart of this thread. When speaking Esperanto, the odds are much better that cultural misunderstandings can come into play, because (for example) Latins and Anglo-Saxons both speak Esperanto. In natural languages you are often much safer, because many of those speaking a single language will also share a culture, and perhaps a locality as well. Esperanto is all about crossing those boundaries...which unfortunately means encountering potentially unsettling faux pas that the other person might not even be able to warn you against, because they simply take them for granted.

The idea of always using "vi", as I understand it, is that you can never go wrong with a "respectful" form. If you "invade someone's personal space" with an undesired level of intimacy, regardless of your intentions, it can be rather off-putting.

...and yes, many of us with Anglo-Saxon backgrounds would be seriously weirded out if someone we hardly knew came up and gave us a hug.

I am afraid I wont be considered a good esperantist, but my Esperanto world is only LERNU. Of course I knew something of the language, before someone told me about LERNU, but I've never cultivated the language as a matter of fact. When I first learnt some Esperanto I learnt to say CI. I cann't figure someone feeling him/herself offended by being addressed to, with this word. There are other languages in which people always use second singular even if he or she speaks to God. And languages very far one from the other like latin with its "TU" or arabic with its "ANTA and ANTI". To me it was a surprise when I met LERNU and read peopl using VI, with both value of singular and pluaral.
So I have to agree with Djino whos says:

Saying "ci" can not be compared with bad manners because, as you know, it's not a bad manner. You can speak politely saying "ci".
I understood informality is offensive to you? oh and... standing too close is invading? It's interesting, I didn't know there was such a difference between latin and anglo-saxon cultures.