お預かりのお知らせ

Last week I misplaced my postal savings account's passbook, a neat little thing onto which the ATM can routinely print out all transactions. I still had the ATM card, so I was not separated from my money, but I still needed to get it replaced. (Honestly, it's probably in my room somewhere, but better safe and all that.)

While I was out yesterday, a slip was left for me. I originally assumed it meant they attempted delivery but failed; closer perusal suggests it was in fact a request of me to arrange when and how I would like it delivered. I was somewhat astonished at the wide range of methods they offered. Not only was there a number to call, I could also fill out and mail or fax the form on the reverse side, visit an Internet site, or go to a special service window.

And neither was the form restrictive. It provided spaces in which one could request delivery to one's workplace, or a neighbor, or a local post office.

I like the Japanese postal system, which may be cut loose from the government very soon. I presume it runs a deficit, but the real question is, and will remain no matter its fate, how well it serves the public.

To switch subjects: I recently delved into the complicated history of English second-person (=2P) pronouns for the benefit of some etymophiles in a blog's comments, and was pleased to see a respondent identifying him/herself as a grad student in pre-1500 English literature confirm my story. (Not bad considering I simply closely examined the OED entries for "you" and "thou.") It's a very interesting story -- which is to say, for me and about five other people -- and so I'll repeat it here.

I had already known, you see, that "you" used to be the polite 2P in English, and "thou" the familiar which died out. But I hadn't been aware that the existence of a polite 2P pronoun was itself relatively recent.

Old English, like Modern English, did not distinguish. Below are its 2P declensions. (I have written them as their later equivalents, and removed the forms which died out (including a dual, for the love of God) for better understanding.)

	Singular	Plural
Nominative	thou	ye
Possessive	thine	your
Dative	thee	you
Accusative	thee	you

That is, back then what we now recognize as "you" was the 2P plural! And not the main plural, but only its accusative and dative forms.

In Middle English, then, starting around 1400, we began our brief flirtation with a polite 2P. Just as Latin had done in its later years, we reapplied the grandeur of the plural to implicitly praise individuals. (At about the same time, we began to use "you" as a nominative in place of "ye" -- "you are" must once have sounded as horrible as "me am," a nice tribute to language change.)

But this process seems not to have reached a state of equilibrium. Perhaps, I wonder, there was a positive-feedback loop wherein the more people perceived the benefits of addressing someone with a polite pronoun, the more they perceived a benefit to using it with people slightly lower in status than the current norms suggested. At one point, the OED says, "you" was used to address superiors; later on, both to superiors and to equals; and so it squeezed and squeezed from the top until "thou" had been obliterated, except perhaps in a few dialects, and the Quakers.

This contrasts with Latinate languages. Some kept the Latin vos, as French with its vous. Others replaced it with new constructs: Spanish adopted vuestra Merced, "Your Grace," and later shortened it to usted; Italian took a similar noun phrase which was then replaced with a pronoun, Lei, "she" (because the noun is feminine). But as far as I know they all kept the familiar, some descendant of Latin tu.

The contrast is not so stark, actually. It does seem that when status is injected into personal pronoun systems, their stability over time (usually quite high) decreases. It's all the more so in Japanese. There, pronouns are needed far less often grammatically, and almost all of them have a lot about personal identity lodged in them, necessitating a lot of knowledge of their implications for proper use. They might as well be nouns with pronominal associations, if that makes any sense. They typically started life as nouns, too: 私 watashi, the most neutral 1P pronoun, once meant "personal matters"; 僕 boku, a more relaxed young-male 1P, was "servant"; 君 kimi, a relaxed 2P that can be intimate or demeaning, was "lord." As the centuries pass, they never seem to stay the same. There is generational variation even today, old people stereotypically saying "washi" for "watashi."

This general phenomenon, in Europe and in Japan, probably exists because social pressures can change language much faster than other processes. Disconnect pronouns from social matters, and they will change mostly just as a part of overall pronunciation change in the language, like Old English "ic" and "we" becoming "I" and "we."