polite vy

[Daniel Collins]

See Boris Unbegaun, "Un point d'histoire de la politesse russe:  
tutoiement et vousoiement," in Mélanges en l'honneur de Jules Legras  
(Paris, 1939), 269–74; and  R. Benacchio [Benakk'o], "Novyi tip  
chelovecheskikh otnoshenii: obrashchenie na Vy v petrovskuiu epokhu,"  
in Logicheskii analiz iazyka: Obraz cheloveka v kul'ture i iazyke  
(Moscow, 1999), 114–23.

Daniel E. Collins, Chair
Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures
The Ohio State University
400 Hagerty Hall
1775 College Road
Columbus, Ohio 43210-1340
On Dec 21, 2005, at 3:12 PM, John Dingley wrote:

> 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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