Students should do their best. or We expect the best work each and every student is capable of. (and excuse my dangling participle, but there really isn't an English rule against that)
Proto Indo-European. Nothing to do with willies, despite @Tenderiser's wishes. The story of European languages goes back quite a ways further than Latin.
I used to laugh at the Académie française, with its battle against English loan words, but here, Japanese really is dying out. A recent study I read (no cite, sorry) said that roughly 30% of the words that Japanese people under the age of 25 use in conversation are foreign loan words, and as an English teacher, I can tell you that they're being used incorrectly (that is, what the young Japanese think they mean is not what they mean to the English, or even American, speaking world). The death of kanji is another thing, albeit one that I tend to celebrate, but with the advent of predictive text and autocorrect, young people aren't really conversant in Chinese characters anymore. Mostly they tend to be able to pick the correct meaning from a list after typing in the sound in kana, but supposedly have quite a bit of trouble writing out the appropriate character. They do have lovely handwriting though. Romanji, the Roman alphabet, is pretty tolerant of odd angles and variant ways of writing letters, but Chinese characters must be written just so, or the whole thing can go to hell, which means that my students almost always have better handwriting than mine. Of course, so do coked-up spiders with Parkinson's, and even medical doctors, but that's neither here nor there.
I've never really studied language(s) all that hard, so it would be interesting to find out how much of the Indo-European root is still in modern English. Thanks. Oh, and I think we have to make allowances for @Tenderiser. With her being a romance writer, she may simply be her brainstorming for a new angle on a love scene.
I do find it a bit peculiar that most people who disdain the use of singular they do so because of the default plurality of they, and yet they don't think twice about using you as the singular 2nd person. Not only did you migrate from plural to singular and usurp the place of thou (and pretty much just yesterday, on linguistic timelines) but it's also the original object pronoun, not the subject pronoun. The subject pronoun was ye, as in Hear ye, hear ye. But, nope, everyone's groovy with that....
I'm a northern (USA) boy, but in my time wearing green, I learned to use and love "y'all" (or "you all") as a proper group plural. Of course, then I ended up working with a Joisey guy for a while, but somehow "youse" never stuck.
Which goes to show the robustness and self-repairing nature of grammar. To this day y'all, yous, and youz are thought of as ungrammatical regionalisms by laypeople, yet from a linguist's point of view they seem like perfectly natural, logical resolutions to fill in the pronoun gap left by the migration of ye/you. I'm a southern boy; y'all is indispensable to my speaking lexicon. ETA: Does any speaking region of BrE have a similar feature as the y'all, yous, youz dynamic?
Good points, @Wreybies. There was a time when the only person addressed as 'you' in a singular way was a king or other royal personage. I think it migrated to everyone else when the masses got uppity. And it was just the first in a long line of uppity behavours, this demanding to be addressed as 'you.' And where has it led? Now everyone wants respect and their own car and rights under the law... Geez! When's it gonna end!!
It defo had to do with the point in time when class structure became more fluid and there was suddenly room for upward movement. It became fashion and then de rigueur for people "movin' on up" to make use of the more formal modes of address in order to shed themselves of their old thou-ishness, so to speak. Now, why we took only the object pronoun (you) and not the subject pronoun (ye) is something I need to research. If the same dynamic were present in the migration of they to singular use, we'd be arguing about singular them rather than singular they. Imagine: "If anyone needs to use the restroom, them should ask now. It's a long trip." That's pretty much what we do with modern you. Funny bit is, that you has been migrating for quite a while. English did at one time have singular, dual, and plural (more than two), and ye was the "more than two" form. Middle English dropped the distinction between dual and plural, retaining the old plural form and deleting the dual form, and it wasn't until the late 1700's that you again shifted to the singular.
I blame it on uneducated merchants who'd learned to count but not read. Which makes me wonder why we didn't stick 'thou' in there somewhere (rhymes with 'you,' instead of 'now') And that makes me wonder where, in the name of all that's linguistically holy, did we did get the singular 'me??' And why didn't we retain 'thee?' Okay, that last one I'll take a shot at: They wanted the pronunciation of 'thee' for special cases of 'the.'
Me as the object pronoun (originally the dative case pronoun when English had a full complement of cases) is actually very, very old and found in quite recognizable forms across the Indo-European spectrum. It simple got hedged out when you (formal) became the norm. There's a lower threshold of use where, if a word passes below this threshold, the likelihood that it just goes away is very high. Probably not. All languages happily make use of all sorts homonyms without thinking twice. Either context or syntax (or both) nearly always makes the meaning in use clear. There would be no need to reserve a special place for the that sounds like thee. We used both versions (just like today) when thee was still very much in use. No one was confused.
But it just seems like 'me,' 'thee,' and 'ye' were all different (object, dative, whatever) whereas because they only differ in prefixing letters, logic would say they are all the same except in personhood. But then, language is rarely logical.
Aye, would that it were so simple. Me = dative. Thee = also dative. Ye = nominative. Following the vowels is a game of rabbit-down-the-hole. They are flighty little creatures and change with ease. They are never considered when looking at word roots. Hence, were we to compare root structure of cognates and related words, for example... KiND GeNDeR or from English to Spanish... oRaNGe NaRaNJa ... we only take the consonants into account. In the case of kind v. gender, the -er is a known suffix, thus is discounted as root. G and K are versions of one another (voiced and unvoiced) and trade places all the time. And in the case of orange v. naranja, we know that the N was lost due to juncture loss, and G and J are another consonant pair that often trade places.
This thread is beginning to remind me of a book we used to have on our bathroom bookshelf. I don't remember the name, but it was about odd word origins... and most do seem to be odd.
Nothing is odder to me than the fact that etymologically speaking the word money and the word wedding are related. It's a distance kinship, but it's there.
