Borrowing pronouns

Barbara Need nee1 at midway.uchicago.edu
Fri Mar 26 00:59:24 UTC 1999


I have noticed that, in this discussion on the possible sources
of Spanish Usted (Vuestra Merced vs. an Araboc word for 'teacher'),
nothing has been said about the fact that, at least in Modern
Spanish, the pronoun occurs with _third_ person forms, not second
person forms. Having only just read the proposal that the form
is from Arabic, I accepted that Vuestra Merced, like Your Majesty
in English, would occur with third person verbs. Is it equally
likely that the Arabic Teacher would also have occurred with
third person verbs?

Barbara Need
University of Chicago--Linguistics



More information about the Indo-european mailing list