“We” Will Rock You! (In First Person Plural Clusive)

What subject to choose to begin another year of blogging?

Travel? Architecture? The outdoors? Literature?

Let’s have some fun with grammar!

Not only that: Let’s enjoy some grammar that doesn’t even exist in English!

Why would we do such a thing? Read on to find out how “we” will rock you.

We: First Person Plural Pronoun. Easy!

We’ll rely on our basic English grammar, I promise. As we all know, the English first person plural pronoun is “we.” Whether two of us or all seven billion of us on earth do something, “we” do it.

We few, we happy few

Whether one says, “We go to the store” or “We are such stuff as dreams are made of,” it’s “we.” The same holds for any of the billion first person sentences ever written or spoken in English since about 1400 c.e.

However, some languages make finer distinctions about “we,” and require additional words to do it.

Although you may never have thought about it, “we” can signify a variety of relationships.

Speaking to colleagues at work, I might say, “We did a really good job on that project.”

I’m referring to myself and the other people present. In that case, all of us are included in “we.”

Once I’m home, telling The Counselor about the success of the project, I can say precisely the same thing: “We did a really good job on that project.” But she is excluded from the “we.” As a native English speaker, she understands that distinction.

In English, one pronoun — “we” — works in both instances.

We danced our tails off.

Not For All, Though

Quite a few languages require different forms of the “we” pronoun, depending on whether it’s being used inclusively or exclusively. There’s an inclusive form of the pronoun when speaking to one or more people who are present and part of the action, but there’s a different, exclusive form of the pronoun if the person to whom I’m speaking isn’t among the “we.”

Among the numerous languages that require the distinction are Ainu (Japan), Chechen, Lakota, Malay, Mandarin, Punjabi, Samoan, Shawnee, Tagalog and Vietnamese.

The general term for this inclusive/exclusive distinction is “clusivity.”

It’s one small reminder of the vastly diverse linguistic world we inhabit, and how minutely we humans are able to parse our relationships and shades of meaning through language.

I occasionally have readers from Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam. I’d be interested in comments about the inclusive/exclusive third person plural. Do you find it useful? Does the lack of it make English seem vague or ambiguous?

One More “We:” Dual Number

I learned about clusivity only recently. It reminded me of another unusual pronoun form I learned when I studied Old English long ago: dual number.

Back to our basic grammar. We learned about “number.” There’s singular — I, you, he, she, it — and plural: we, you, they.

A third type — dual number — was once common in Indo-European languages — including English — but has mostly fallen out of use.

Dual number specifies an action done by two people in unison. The modern English equivalent is “we two.” As an example, one might say, “We two went dancing.” In today’s English — and most other languages — it’s become regular plural number, but many languages once had separate pronouns for dual number.

Despite our different backgrounds, we two are in love.

You old rockers know an example of dual number from the canon of great works. Eric Clapton sang it in “Sunshine of Your Love:”

“Yes, I’m with you, my love; it’s the morning and just we two.”

Old English had dual number as a distinctive first person dual pronoun: wit. It faded from use as the language evolved into Middle English and became “we two.” Languages which preserve dual number pronouns include Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Slovenian.

Speaking and Reading in a Complex World

I don’t expect to learn Malay, Tagalog or Slovenian, but I believe that appreciating the staggering complexity of human language opens a path to accepting the diversity of our world. I happened to grow up speaking the language that’s become a global lingua franca. It behooves me to understand how vastly different other languages are in order to appreciate how much effort it takes to read and speak English if one’s native language has not just different vocabulary, but a radically different grammatical structure.

Living here in polyglot Los Angeles, I see plenty of signs and billboards that reflect the fact they were composed by people whose native languages don’t employ articles, make no distinction between singular and plural number, or are highly inflected and require few pronouns. I can’t speak those languages at all, and it’s no surprise that immigrants find English challenging. Let’s roll with it.

I welcome comments from speakers of Ainu, Chechen, Lakota, Malay, Mandarin, Punjabi, Samoan, Shawnee, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Slovenian about today’s post. Did I get things right? Please write in English, or I’ll be stuck using auto-translate, which isn’t as reliable as your own English.

I learned about the existence of clusivity in Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives; The Eurasiatic Language Family, Volume 1: Grammar, Joseph H. Greenberg, Stanford University Press; Stanford, California; 2000.

© Brad Nixon 2019. Two photographs © M. Vincent 2019, used by kind permission. “Hip Hop” sculpture copyright Georgia Gerber. This post is dedicated to B. & G., who sent me Dr. Greenberg’s book. Thank you, muchas gracias, danke.