>>221403214
I thought it was "they"

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>>221403214
Fun Italy Fact: it was originally "Voi" (plural You). "Lei" (she) only started coming up during the 16th century alongside it. Mussolini tried to ban the use of "She", but it didn't last long and nowadays it's the more commonly used formal address (except in the South, where "Voi" is well and alive).

>>221403357
that's the old fashioned way that the fascists tried to resurrect and failed

btw "lei" is of Spanish origin: it dates back to the Spanish presence in Italy in the Renaissance

>>221403644
Why did they try to ban it? Because it was gay? How could it be foreign?

>>221404065
It was Ethpanish apparently
>Because it was gay?
Yeah it says it right there, it's feminine

>>221403644
>(except in the South, where "Voi" is well and alive).
This is the equivalent of "Vos" in Spanish, which is the singular second person.
In Spain, it's considered archaic and only heard in movies about the Middle Ages or 16th to 18th centuries.
They still used it in everyday conversation in Argentina, which coincidentally received lots of Italian immigration.

>>221404112
But spaniards are the ones who say vos. Lei is native

Sissylians

>>221403712
>btw "lei" is of Spanish origin: it dates back to the Spanish presence in Italy in the Renaissance
don't make up bullshit about your own language
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lei#Italian

in German, formal "you" is the same word as "they" AND "she". no need to bicker.

>>221408382
"lei" = "she" refers to "her excellency", "her grace" or other honorific titles of the person you're addressing
it is feminine because the gender of the possessive pronoun in Italian goes with the possessed, not the owner as in English

e.g. his daughter (of the father) = sua figlia (not suo figlia)

the Spanish in Italy in the 1500s used honorifics like "vuestra merced" that were soon shortened to the "lei"
so the interaction with the Spanish customs was pivotal in the birth of the "lei" in the Italian language even though it is an Italian form

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>>221403214
based ngl

>>221409042
>the Spanish in Italy in the 1500s used honorifics like "vuestra merced" that were soon shortened to the "lei"
okay, but then why was it only lei and not also lui?

>>221409042
>words words
nah that shit is gay fra

>>221413121
Because the honorific titles that got abbreviated into the pronoun were all grammatically feminine nouns, never masculine ones that could have yielded "lui". The chain was something like: Vostra Signoria (Your Lordship) > La Signoria Vostra > Lei (the feminine pronoun standing in for the whole phrase). Signoria, Eccellenza, Maestà, Altezza, Santità, etc. every one of these is feminine in Italian. The pronoun agrees with the grammatical gender of the abstract noun, not the sex of the person you're talking to, so even when speaking to a man the reference word stays lei (she). A parallel masculine form would have needed a title like "Vostro Signore" or "Vostro Onore" but those didn't become the conventional formal address. The feminine ones won out completely so only lei grammaticalised as the polite "you".

>>221413891
> A parallel masculine form would have needed a title like "Vostro Signore" or "Vostro Onore" but those didn't become the conventional formal address.
that's what i mean, though
every other language that i'm aware of would still use stuff like "mon seigneur -> mon sieur -> monsieur" or "master -> mister"
sure, the "altesse" in "votre altesse" is feminine, yeah, okay, but how are the masculine ones totally outmoded?

>>221414391
also, it's hard to imagine the people affected being actually okay with this
i can buy retarded spaniards who couldn't be bothered to actually speak a language, but i do not understand how the men being referred to as 'lei' wouldn't be annoyed by this and nip it in the bud (even if it was common referring to people in the third person when speaking to them directly, as is the case when you're using a "you" variant)

>>221413891
All this just sounds to me like Italians are sissyboys who needed us to invade in the 40s to grant you even a tiny bit of masculinity

>>221409042
That's also where the Brazilian você comes from, through a process of contraction:
>vuestra merced
>vossa merçê (PT version)
>vosmecê (19th century version)
>você (current version)
>cê (slang)

But it became an informal second person. Both tu and você are informal here, and both are used depending on the region.
The formal versions nowadays are "o senhor" and "a senhora" (where -nh has the same sound as the Italian -gn, of course). Though Brazilians are not as strict with the formal/informal difference.

The Portuguese too had você back in the day, but managed to get rid of it.

>>221414500
Because by the time "lei" had fully crystallised as the formal pronoun (roughly 16th–17th century) it was no longer felt as the feminine pronoun "she", it had been reanalysed as a purely formal second-person marker. The same thing happens in German: Sie (capitalised) is identical to "she" and "they", yet no German man thinks you're calling him a woman when you ask "Möchten Sie etwas trinken"? The formal pronoun bleaches its original gender content, it becomes a grammatical politeness morpheme.

The process was gradual so there was no single moment where a man suddenly got called "she" to his face. At the start you were literally saying "Your Lordship (Vostra Signoria) is invited" with the feminine agreement naturally falling on the abstract noun. As it eroded to "lei", the collocation was so strongly associated with deference that the gender mismatch with the referent was irrelevant. Social meaning (high respect) completely overpowered any predicative feminine meaning. If anything, insisting on "voi" or a masculine form would have felt lower-status or provincial which is exactly why Mussolini's heavily propagandised campaign to ban "lei" in favour of "voi" was ridiculed and ultimately failed. Men of all ranks continued using "lei" because they perceived it as the prestigious formal standard, not as an insult to their masculinity.

Also Spanish "usted" comes from "vuestra merced" (feminine) and is used for men and women alike, nobody ever "nipped it in the bud". Linguistic politeness systems are largely driven by conventionalisation, not by literal semantic interpretation. People don't parse a formal pronoun as a gendered statement about the addressee, they parse it as a register marker. So the men were totally okay with it and still are.

>>221414391
They aren't "outmoded" in the sense of being beaten by a competitor, they were never in the race to become a pronoun. French "monsieur", English "mister/master" are common nouns/titles, not grammaticalised second-person pronouns. The French polite pronoun is "vous" (2pl) not a noun-turned-pronoun. So the real cross-linguistic parallel is not monsieur but Spanish "usted" which comes from "vuestra merced", also a feminine abstract noun and yet nobody asks why Spaniards didn't use a masculine title instead.

The mechanism that produced "lei" was a specific third-person deferential periphrasis, instead of addressing someone directly with "tu" or "voi", you referred to them indirectly by a noun phrase like "(la) Vostra Signoria" (Your Lordship), "(la) Vostra Eccellenza" (Your Excellency), "(la) Vostra Maestà" (Your Majesty). All of these key honorifics are grammatically feminine regardless of the person's sex. There was no corresponding productive construction with a masculine abstract noun like "Vostro Signore" because "Signore" is a concrete title ("lord"), not an abstraction of quality. The deferential pattern in Italian (and in Spanish) consistently favoured a feminine abstract noun describing the addressee's dignity, authority or rank. A notional parallel like "Vostro Onore" would have been masculine (onore is indeed masculine) but it wasn't the conventional collocation, the chancery and courtly registers already had a fixed stock of feminine reverential nouns. Once the feminine set was grammaticalised as the standard hyper-formal address, there was simply no structural slot for a masculine counterpart to produce "lui" as a parallel polite pronoun. The language didn't "choose" lei over lui from two equally available options, it chose the pronoun that agreed with the noun class of the entrenched honorifics.

So it's not that masculine ones were outmoded, they never had a grammatical pathway into the pronoun system in the first place.

>>221404532
Before vosotros became commonplace vos used to be the plural, just like nos was used instead of nosotros.

>>221415721
>yet no German man thinks you're calling him a woman
Because they're that hyperfeminized as a people. I mean have you seen the Nazis?

>>221409042
>>221415612
That's the same origin of usted, the polite form of you that's more common in latin america.
>vuestra merced
>vuesarced
>vusted
>usted

In this country sumercé (su merced) is also used, but it's considered something that only country bumpkins (and therefore indios) from the center of the country say.

Am I rangebanned

>>221415721
Sie means they and has nothing to do with she. It also makes verbs co jugate like they plural, not singular third person.

>>221403644
zesty

>>221403357
it's like that in german too, but the german word for "they" is homophonous with "she" in modern high german