I think the King that is referred to when saying the King's English is King James, but then again I am Italian and this is my second language so what do I know http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

As a transplanted New Yorker finding myself in the south, I have learned that the plural possessive of "you alls" is your all's as in, How are your all's cats doing?

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i think y(apostrophy)all is plural: the -all- meaning everyone you are addressing to... if talking to just one person, you would say: you take care, you hear?
instead of yall take care....

(sorry, my keyboard does not type out punctuation marks, if anyone knows how, please e-mail me, thanks yall... that means ALL of YOU http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif)

Belle, do not worry about the punctuation. Trust me, just read some my post with Punctuation all over the place.

What you could try to do is:

Hold down the SHIFT Key on either side of the keyboard and then hit the sign above the #'s.

The "." should come out without a shift key.

Hold down the SHIFT Key on either side of the keyboard and then hit the sign above the #'s. Catman, I trust every tip ov you 100%. That's the outcome using my swiss-german-keyboard (on my Mac):

` ° " * ç % & / ( ) = ? ^

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/biggrin.gif

Rudi-

Except for Arturo perhaps, how does one id a "non-native-english Flyertalkers". Is that a category posted by names that you are suggesting??

I always thought that 'you' was the singular form just about everywhere in the US, but to summarize on the plural forms and maybe add one or two:

Texas - y'all
Southeast - you-all
California - you guys
Chicago - youse

Pittsburgh/W. Pennsylvannia - y'uns
Jersey - yous guys

Yous guys is Brooklynese it ain't from Jerzee. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

Rudi, amen.

I agree very much with what you are saying. We don't always recognize that what may be completely correct English can be tough to interpret if you are not native/fluent.

As many of you know I work with Latin Americans a lot. Many of them have studied in the USA, but I always reread my emails and memos to them. I always find things to simplify.

Remember communication is a 2 way street--it does no good if you do it unilaterally!!!

(recent flight from Curacao to Miami--the AA flight purser spoke so fast (English) that even us monolinguals were having trouble understanding. We finally pulled the flight attendant who was doing the pantomime aside to tell her to get him to slow it down. It was particularly inappropriate for an international flight to a non-English speaking island).

hold down the shift key while typing the numbers: !@#$%&*()

it didnt work, Catman... http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/frown.gif

Oops Belle, I meant hold down the shift key when typing the punctuation. You don't have to with the numbers.

Sometimes I can write wrong, and that's ok. We are all only human! http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

Hi Belle,

If your PC is set up for Windows, there should be an accessory called Character Map (icon looks like a runestone) which gives additional punctuation choices (such as ñ, ç, ö). For example, the apostrophe is made by holding down the Alt key and typing 0146 on the number pad. See if this works.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by honu:
..."you guys". This expression is definitely the equivalent of "you" plural, and I've heard it used to address mixed gender groups, as well as groups of females.

I've sometimes wondered about this. While it's true that one can address a group of females as "you guys", it is simply not possible to refer to one woman in the same manner (See that guy over there in the red skirt with the nice legs?). In any case, if it were up to me this monstrosity would have never wormed its way into the language. I once saw a nineteen year old waitress in a diner walk up to a table of senior citizens and ask, "Would you guys like some more coffee?". Come on.

Ok, here comes my first (and hopefully last) mini-rant since I started posting almost a year ago. Apologies and please don't flame me for taking up bandwidth with something not even remotely related to travel.

protomartyr,

as I mentioned in my previous post, "you guys" is a West Coast PLURAL (and genderless) form which corresponds to other regional pl. forms such as "y'all" and all those other pl. forms listed in MWS's post. So, as you correctly notice, it can't refer to a single individual (female or male).

Around Shakespeare's time English had a way to distinguish between the second singular and plural persons: one was "thou", the other was "you". Later on, for reasons that I'm not aware of, "thou" disappeared, and "you" became the all-purpose second person Plural AND singular. I bet that many grammarians at the time must have been horrified by this monstruosity too... http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/wink.gif Perhaps, English speakers miss having two distinct words for two distinct concepts after all, so that might explain these non-standard plural forms that keep popping up in the language.

The fact is, from a strictly linguistic point of view, "you guys" is not a mostruosity. I'm sure the waitress who addressed the elderly couple in such a manner meant no disrespect but simply indicated that she was addressing both. Spoken language is constantly changing (otherwise, I'd be speaking some form of Latin and you - probably - Chaucerian English); new forms are created every day and old ones fall into disuse. Many of the new forms won't stick, but some will, and it's impossible to predict with accuracy what will become codified into the standard language (so many factors can influence that) and what will be forgotten. For example, it's only an accident of history that current Italian has its roots in the Latin dialect spoken in Tuscany after the turn of the last millennium (had history been a bit different, we could all be speaking a modern form of Sicilian); or that modern English has acquired so many Latin-based words.

Anyway, it's not up to you, or me, or Samuel Johnson, or the Academie Francoise (Rudi, sorry for butchering the spelling, I've got a US keyboard) to determine what "worms" its way into a language. The only thing we can really do is study this fascinating process that is a living language.

There. End of the mini-lecture. Now "you guys" know what I studied in college (and what part of the country I lived in) http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/wink.gif. To save face and make at least a tenuous connection to the original topic, I'll add this: when we explain complex technical stuff about ticket fares, ticket rules, etc., yes, we should probably try to stick to some kind of standard English (but then again, there is standard U.S. Engl., standard British Engl., etc.). If, on the other hand, we are having a less technical discussion, then perhaps a few idioms or regionalisms here and there can be understood even by non-native speakers. After all, it's one more way we can learn from each other, no?

I am sooooooooooo©® proud that my undeserving selfish first post turns out to inniciate a sophisticated discussion of idiomatic peculiarities (I just looked up that expression in my dic). I enjoy reading all of the above. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif