borrowing pronouns

[maher, johnpeter]

Let's say  I was gratuitously offensive.  MCV was gratuitously dismissive.
Don't pepper your prose with "clearly, surely, perhaps", and  -- shifting
metaphors -- your balloon won't get pricked.

I  knew about both etymologies. He didn't, or he did not deign to show why the
Arabic etymology should be excluded.

It is beyond question that generations of Castilians and foreigner have been
taught that <Vd. / Usted> is a compression of <Vuestra Merced>. Which doesn't
make it true.

 Now, if <V[uestra Merc]ed> should be the source of <Vd.>, was there, in the
early period of the usage, gender concord in complement adjectives?

E.g., spoken to a man:  "!Vd. está viva! " [I lack Castilian font: please
invert first  /!/.]

And, when did the masculine adjectives achieve acceptance, if <Vd.> was ever
= <vuestra merced>?

IE Etymology needs not only Cognates, Sound Laws, and Analogy, but also syntax
and morphology.

jpm
......................................

Rick Mc Callister wrote:

>         This one's hard to prove either way.
>         That usted looks like ustadh is obvious but forms based on vuesa
> merced, vuestras mercedes DO come close to usted.
>         BUT if usted is documented before the other forms, I'd say it is
> very possible that usted is from Arabic and that the other forms are folk
> etymologies. Conversely, one could argue that usted is the folk etymology
> --provided that one could show that the other forms predated it.
>         The problem lies in that one has to wonder why usted didn't appear
> in Old Spanish when Arabic influence was much strong. I'd guess that the
> only possible way to argue that Usted is from Arabic would be to try to
> maintain that's it's a loanword from Mozarabe that spread from the South.
> But you'd have to document that.

[ moderator snip of remainder of long RMcC post ]