743: 2nd Person Pronouns Dec 20, 2016

Two of the most commonly used words in English are 'I' and 'you'. Despite their commonality and seemingly fundamental necessity, while, 'I' is more or less universal, 'you' is incredibly difficult to translate. In languages unlike Standard American English, there will be different forms for the singular and the plural, and in some cases there is a separate word for specifically 2 addressees. English used to make the distinction between the informal, 'thou' formal, 'you' and plural, 'ye' but this was eventually largely dropped. Other languages also have different forms for levels of familiarity and necessary respect, sometimes just with informal and formal terms, but there could be many more. In fact, in the 18th century, a Chinese emperor had a scholar, and his entire family, executed for using a pronoun that was too familiar. The final distinguishing factor that many languages make is gender, but often there is also a lot of combining of the previously mentioned 3, as in Spanish plural, masculine or feminine, formal or informal pronouns. Some languages like Portuguese omit this pronoun as it is unnecessary from conjugation, but other ones like Japanese or Korean will omit them with absolutely no context and force the listener to guess.