polite vy

[John Dingley]

Hi,

Might someone point me in the right direction? I am trying to 
ascertain when the polite vy (i.e. the T/V distinction) started to 
appear in Russian. I have poked about in the library and on the web
to no avail. Guessing now, I don't think it was there in the Old
Russian momuments and I would assume it came in when Russia opened
up to the West, so maybe as late as Peter. The phenomenon was known
in Western Europe as early as medieval times, according to Sonmez's 
Linguistlist review of the following well-known book:

Taavitsainen, Irma and Andreas H Jucker, eds. (2003) Diachronic
Perspectives on Address Term Systems, John Benjamins Publishing
Company, Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 107

Date: Sat, 08 Nov 2003 23:21:58 +0000
From: Margaret Sonmez <margaretmetu.edu.tr>
Subject: Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems

http://linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-3049.html

As a concluding comment, it should perhaps be mentioned that this
book, which is so the very nearly a textbook on changes in European
address term systems, discusses a very dynamic area of language. There
have been many changes in the T/V type systems studied here. In spite
of their frequency in the world's languages, such systems, in European
languages at least, do not seem to be that stable. Their presence in
any of the languages investigated has been a medieval or late medieval
innovation, and they have changed through time. In many cases the
changes are rapid and great: the German system, for instance, where an
early form of T/V situation is found from the late ninth century
(Simon, 88), has shown a major change every century since the early
seventeenth century (illustrated by Simon on page 86). Within only
three centuries the Czech system added five forms to its originally
unique second person singular address form (illustrated by Betsch on
page 141). For French, ''the employment of the T/V forms in Old and
Middle French is often regarded . . .as completely unstable and the
two forms are still often thought of as feely interchangeable'' (Hunt,
47). The written English system developed a complex interaction
between T/V pronouns and other markers of politeness and affect for a
few hundred years starting in the mid 13th Century (Burnley, 28),
before rapidly jettisoning the system along with the useful
singular-plural distinction that 'thou'/'you' had also maintained, in
the 17th century.

John Dingley

--------------------
http://dlll.yorku.ca/jding.html

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