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Vi,ci kaj vi, ho mia!

ca, kivuye

Ubutumwa 19

ururimi: English

rann (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 24 Kigarama 2015 05:39:21

In Esperanto there's the uncommon second person singular pronoun "ci". Now the thing I don't know is, is it only used in familiarity along with "Vi" as the respectful form, or can also be used to actually convey one second-person?

erinja (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 24 Kigarama 2015 05:47:51

It is intended to convey a second person singular ONLY - without any connotation of formality or informality.

I do not suggest using it. It may cause confusion because some speakers of languages that differ between formal and informal "you" forms use "vi" and "ci" as formal and informal forms. This is not correct Esperanto but if someone refers to you as "ci", in most cases you don't actually know whether they are using a simple singular form, or whether it is intended to be informal.

Zamenhof himself recommended not to use this form. Today, we mainly use it to translate expressions like the French "tutoyer" - we call that "cidiri" in Esperanto {ci/dir/i, to say "ci" ).

If you do decide to use it, you may be understood to be a beginner making a mistake and not realizing that this word isn't used, or you might be understood to be someone trying to affect to sound archaic (it has an archaic sound to it, much like using "thou" in English), or you might be taken as just plain strange.

rann (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 24 Kigarama 2015 05:52:26

erinja:It is intended to convey a second person singular ONLY - without any connotation of formality or informality.

I do not suggest using it. It may cause confusion because some speakers of languages that differ between formal and informal "you" forms use "vi" and "ci" as formal and informal forms. This is not correct Esperanto but if someone refers to you as "ci", in most cases you don't actually know whether they are using a simple singular form, or whether it is intended to be informal.

Zamenhof himself recommended not to use this form. Today, we mainly use it to translate expressions like the French "tutoyer" - we call that "cidiri" in Esperanto {ci/dir/i, to say "ci" ).

If you do decide to use it, you may be understood to be a beginner making a mistake and not realizing that this word isn't used, or you might be understood to be someone trying to affect to sound archaic (it has an archaic sound to it, much like using "thou" in English), or you might be taken as just plain strange.
Thanks, I wasn't planning on using but I was thinking how it could used biblically, similar to how it was used in KJV (in that case Thou).

opalo (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 24 Kigarama 2015 06:01:58

In Zamenhof's own translation of the Old Testament he always uses vi for everything, with a capital letter if it refers to God.

The only purpose of ci is to show temporarily (in translated dialogue) a change in pronoun, in languages which have more than one version of the word "you".

erinja (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 24 Kigarama 2015 06:02:42

rann:Thanks, I wasn't planning on using but I was thinking how it could used biblically, similar to how it was used in KJV (in that case Thou).
You could definitely do that, it sounds great if you want to sound archaic.

In case you were wondering, Zamenhof did not elect to do this in his translation of the Hebrew Bible; "vi" is the usual form of "you", singular or plural.

Hebrew does differentiate between singular and plural "you" (no formality difference) and also between male and female "you", but Zamenhof didn't carry this distinction into Esperanto.

opalo (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 24 Kigarama 2015 06:06:09

Oops! We responded at the same time. Sorry.

erinja (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 24 Kigarama 2015 14:09:15

Roch:I see no problem to use ci, not archaically, that may well have been proposed by french people at the beginning of the esperanto... and later on english people refused it for the relation it took with their archaic "thou."
You're leaving out that Zamenhof himself recommended not to use it. I am not even sure why he included it in the language but at any rate he didn't use it and he recommended not to use it. Zamenhof was neither French nor English, of course.

bartlett22183 (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 24 Kigarama 2015 18:05:58

In English, of course, the 'thou/ye' distinction dropped out of the language long ago. I myself think this is unfortunate, as even as an educated native speaker (of General American), I have often been in speaking situations in which lack of singular and plural second person pronouns has required awkward circumlocutions. This is one instance in which I think languages which make the singular/plural distinction without regard to informality or intimacy in the singular have an advantage over those languages, such as (modern) English which do not. Let us note that among conIALs, Ido makes this distinction (it actually has two second person singular pronouns, one general 'vu' and one rarely used intimate 'tu' ), I would say as one of its few advantages over Esperanto. (The other is a sex-neutral third person singular pronoun.)

Vestitor (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 24 Kigarama 2015 23:01:54

I've been sitting here racking my brains, trying to imagine a face-to-face speaking situation where the lack of a plural you in English causes grave misunderstanding.

bartlett22183 (Kwerekana umwidondoro) 24 Kigarama 2015 23:17:49

?????? This in fact can come up frequently! I can recall speaking to my own mother and saying 'you' when it made a difference whether I was referring to her individually or to both her and my father. I genuinely do consider it a defect in language when there is not a distinction between singular and plural second person pronouns. Recently I was reading a translation of the Islamic Qur'an, which makes the distinction, and the translator had to interpolate parenthetical words in order to make the sense clear as to who was being addressed. As I have mentioned before, I consider this one small element in which Ido is superior to Esperanto.

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