Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>Am I fundamentally misunderstanding something here?

Perhaps.

For one, Google translate is not very accurate, even for simple stuff.

Second, the translations it picks might no be the form that has survived from the old times. Newer words might have put the use of the older form in disfavour, but it can still exist in the language. If something was the same in a language from 15,000 years ago up to 500 years ago, it won't be picked up in Google Translate, which will pick the current vernacular.

Third, they probably give an exact table of the equivalencies they found in the actual paper. It would be easier to check that if they have it available for free.

Four, they speak about how words sound, not how the look. So you have to take pronunciation of each language into account, which often can be quite different from what is written.

View on HN

Yes, saying that "thou" is a word that has survived for hundreds of centuries is a bit odd to me. As far as I can tell, the only reason thou even exists as a word in modern English (at least in the US) is because it's so heavily used in the Bible (not exactly a modern book). The only times I hear someone using thou is in context of the Bible or ye olde tyme joking.

Bible wasn't originally written in English of course. The more recent the translation, the less Thou you get. We didn't have much alternative for 2nd person singular pronouns until "You" wiped "Thou" off the map somewhat recently and attempts at turning "Thou" into a formal religious version of "You" seem to have flopped. Then again we did pretty well without a second person plural until y'all invented y'all, plus or minus some "ye" anyway.

Theres some idioms that'll never die even if no one understands the history. "Holier than thou". Much like "Your name is Mudd" sometimes kinda horrifies people who don't know the story of Abe Lincoln and Dr Mudd. I've met people who claim to not know the history of "cotton pickin hands" or even acknowledge its racial background, which seems hard to believe, then again cotton hasn't been hand harvested in a couple generations locally so its possible the kids were telling the truth about not knowing what they're saying...

Well, "thou" also had a use for a period of time as an intimate form of "you." The intention behind the use of "Thou" to address God in the Bible is not to place distance between the speaker and God; on the contrary, it is to indicate closeness and intimacy.

The Wikipedia article on thou explains this briefly in the introductory paragraphs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou

Looking up "cotton pickin" in Google ngram viewer, it appears to be mostly a product of the 1960s-1970s ruralsploitation fad: The Beverly Hillbillies, Hee Haw and Foghorn Leghorn.

It's probably just an intentionally quaint pseudo-folk saying invented by someone in Burbank.

I don't think the Google ngram viewer is an appropriate tool for something that mostly belongs to the spoken language, and even more that of pour illiterate blacks and southerners.

"It's probably just an intentionally quaint pseudo-folk saying invented by someone in Burbank."

LOL no, assuming you young folks pretending not to understand are serious. As a hint take a look at the skin color and local social hierarchy position of the people picking cotton back when that was still done by hand, by property or former property, as they used to say. It was basically used in place of the "N-word" when it was just barely not socially acceptable to use the "N-word" in that situation.

Shakespeare, among others.

>Yes, saying that "thou" is a word that has survived for hundreds of centuries is a bit odd to me.

Well, for linguists "thou" and "you" is the same word.

Not just in that they mean the same, but in the same sense that in evolution X1 is said to be an ancestor species to X2.

"Thou" and "You", is the same word passed through a process of changes in pronunciation and spelling during the years. Linguists keep track of those kinds of things.

"Thou" is recently deceased, and while it hasn't been thoroughly documented, it's as likely as not due to a combination of the over-extension of the polite form of address and the use in early English typography of the "y" from Latinate typefaces for the thorn character. ("Ye" of "ye olde" is an alternate spelling of "the", and not related to the second person plural subject pronoun "ye".)

The polite plural is common enough in European languages; there are French dialects (in Canada, at least) where a good rule of thumb is "don't use tu unless you're sleeping with that person or are their parent". With the second person singular restricted to intimate use, it's not hard to imagine it falling away.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com