this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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Showerthoughts
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“You” is also ungendered. There seems to be a common idea that English is missing a second person plural. We have one, it’s “you”. We just stopped using the second person singular. That’s what all those variations of “thee, thou, thy” etc were.
“Y’all” would be a superpluralization. If that’s still not enough we also have the ultraplural form of, “all y’all”
All y'all's "all y'all" for all and for y'all
Don't forget y'all'd've as in " y'all'd've been fine with just
y'all"Y'all is exclusive. All y'all is inclusive.
If I walk into a party in a house and a group of my friends are there and I say 'what are y'all doing here?', I'm only talking to my friends.
If I walk into my own house and there's a party there and I say 'what are all y'all doing here?' I'm addressing everyone of the hoodlums in my house.
Edit: To the person who down voted yet contributed nothing to the convo, please feel obliged to read up on clusivity in linguistics.
I was one of the downvotes. Clusivity, as described in your article does not apply to y'all. It's You All...it will never include the speaker.
It'd have to be something like w'all to apply.
"Anyway, here's wonderw'all"
We’re very inclusive in Australia also.
‘G’day you bunch of cunts’ means hello to everyone male, female, known and unknown.
We’re very polite over here.
How very nice of all you cunts over there
All Y'all cunts, we just talked about this.
Whoops. Thanks y'all
Getting pressed enough about a single downvote to make an edit is cringe.
Saying that things other people do are cringe is cringe.
Yeah. We mostly think of grammatical number as a simple choice of singular vs plural but that's not what we do in real life.
We generally have multiple labels that describe the concept of progressively expanding circles of what's included when we think of ourselves.
There's the very narrow sense of I/me/myself. We have various expansions around us/all'y'all. Jamaicans have the phrase "I and I" which focuses on the individual but explicitly calls out the connection with others.
So then "All y'alls" (not all y'all's) would be ultrasuperpluralization?
Sounds right.
Presumably "y'all's" would be the second person superplural possessive.
In New England (the best England), we have “youse”.
We also have "Ya'" where we elide the entire ending and you need to determine plural vs singular from context. For example, "Ya' can't get thea, les' ya been there befoa."