Latin!

[bedlamsbard]

In the wake of a conversatin with my Latin teacher the other day -- I went in to get my translations of the Practice & Review and Sententiae Antiquae sentences from Wheelock checked, since I'm going through and doing the chapters I missed -- I have a VERY IMPORTANT QUESTION for all you Latinists out there.

Poll #5675 The Second Person Plural in Latin!

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 22

View Respondents

When translating from Latin to English, the second person plural is translated as:

View Answers

you
9 (40.9%)

y'all
12 (54.5%)

youse
1 (4.5%)

something else which I shall tell you in the comments
2 (9.1%)

oh dear gods, what have you Americans done to Latin?
6 (27.3%)

An example, from my Latin textbook (note: Wheelock doesn't translate it as y'all, that's how I learned it): Potuistisne bonam vitam sine ulla libertate agere? (Were y'all able to have a good life without any freedom?)

ETA: If you answer in the comments, and you don't mind doing so, can you had where you originally learned it? I'm noticing a tendency from southerners to have learned "y'all" and Californians to have learned "you guys" and I'm really curious about those of y'all that aren't from the U.S., since I know I've got quite a few on my dwircle/flist.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

My Latin I teacher had us translating the second person plural as 'you'. Latin II, AP Latin, and Latin IV (because not enough people were interested in the other AP Latin) teacher had us do 'y'all'. One of these was on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The other was not. Guess which.

Also, English-language pronouns suck.

[bedlamsbard]

See, I learned Latin, originally, in Washington, and my prof there (who was a native Pennsylvanian, I believe, thus the "youse") taught us to translate it as "y'all." My teacher here at Tulane, who is from Texas, told me that she also taught her 101 class to translate it as "y'all."

Totally agree with you on English language pronouns. I like them most of the time, but.

[alexseanchai]

Teacher who taught us 'y'all' was from Louisiana. Teacher who was from and in Mississippi taught us 'you'. It amuses me.

Gender binary, argh. Third-person singular, gender unspecified, argh. Sometimes I think we'd do better if our only third-person singular pronouns were 'this [one]', 'that [one]', and 't'other [one]'.

[azuire]

Sometimes I wrote 'you guys' as a joke, but I'd nomrally use 'you'.

[bedlamsbard]

...suddenly I had the mental image of Cicero addressing the Senate with, "Hey, you guys listen up now!"

[dogstar]

Even better is "HEY YOUSE GUYS LISTEN UP" Tony Soprano Cicero. :P

[bedlamsbard]

Or a very angry Southern Cicero: "Y'ALL SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP I GOT THINGS TO SAY."

[sporky_rat]

....I totally translated Cicero that way in high school. Mrs Magoun was amused. Then she made me do it again. Properly.

[metonomia]

My prof has us parse it as y'all but then we are allowed to say just 'you' in the final translation. His view is that it's really just 'you' with an understood group, but that y'all is good for the class setting.

[bedlamsbard]

That makes sense! I'm really curious about the non-Americans here, because I don't know how they do it in the UK or Australia...

[ceirseach.blogspot.com]

Y'all and youse are far too casual for a classroom setting, in my book, but they're both fairly rare in Australia anyway. We were always taught to translate as 'you', unless the sense is going to be ambiguous in context and that ambiguity might cause confusion, in which case you could paraphrase to 'all of you' or similar. In a classroom situation, if it's necessary to prove that you do know it's plural rather than singular, you might translate as 'you (pl)' and 'you (sing)' on occasion.

[ceirseach.blogspot.com]

... Although of course, as a solution, we could turn English back a few hundred years and consistently use 'you' for the plural and 'thou/thee' for the singular. :)

[metonomia]

Yeah, I do wonder how that would work. I'm learning it in Washington, from a Washingtonian, but I feel like anywhere in America you could have the y'all, whether because it's a thing in that area or because, as with my prof, you're making fun of southerners.

Do the British even have a y'all equivalent?

[bessemerprocess]

I learned Latin in Texas, and thus, y'all.

[bedlamsbard]

"Y'all" is one of the few cases in the English languages where we actually do have a second person plural, I believe one of my profs said.

[dogstar]

Me too. :P Although my high school Latin teacher (who was from NH) always translated it as "you"

[ghostrunner]

I learned Latin in California, thus the second person plural was translated as "you" and understood to mean "you (guys)."

[bedlamsbard]

Heh. I'm noticing a pattern here.

[aella_irene]

You. Both the singular and the plural are you. If you need to differentiate (and you don't in standard English, only in, for example, in tables of verb endings, etc,) it is you (sing.) and you (pl.)

[darklyndsea]

Hilariously enough, I use you in normal speech (you guys if I absolutely must disambiguate), but when I'm working with other languages I use y'all, at least in my head when I'm actually bothering to translate back to English rather than just understanding it as it's written (I have issues saying it out loud more than a couple of times a day, because I might have lived in Texas since I was 6, but I haven't picked up much of the accent or vocabulary). In class, we mostly translate it as just plain you, though I know I've heard everything except for youse, which I have never ever heard somebody actually say in real life.

[highlyeccentric]

I think my Latin teachers sometimes used 'you all'; the preferred translation was 'you (pl)' for exam conditions.

In my head it translates to vous. Obviously I can't write that down in a Latin exam in Australia, which is most agravvating - lots of things translate better into French than English.

[ceirseach.blogspot.com]

Oh, I spent the first two years of learning Latin just translating it directly into Italian. :)

[lady_songsmith]

I mentioned on twitter, and shall repeat here now that I can log in and vote properly -- I was introduced in both NJ and in CA (possibly by way of a east coastie; I did not check) to "yoople" (rhymes with purple, sorta) which is how one pronounces "you (pl)"

[starlady]

I learned in the Delaware Valley and then re-learned in Minnesota, in both of which I was taught to just translate it as 'you.' Sometimes in translating out loud in class we would say 'you all' or 'you plural' or 'all of you,' but frequently not.

[lunarwolfik]

I think "you (pl.)" works pretty well, or maybe "you(s)"?

There is, of course, the mobster version of " 'ey, youse guys" as well. "Y'all" just seems weird and slightly too colloquial for school translating purposes...*shrug*

[alyndra]

In Alaska, we used y'all even though it wasn't normal speech for us, sometimes just you or whatever fit reasonably depending on context.

[sporky_rat]

Totally 'ya'll'. But then, Mississippi with a woman old enough to have taught Cicero. She also had a this big crush on him, kept rubbing the plaster bust of him a little...disturbingly.