Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy

Old English dual pronouns & Germanic connections

• Commenters expand on “wit/unc/git” as dual pronouns (“we two”, “us two”, “you two”).
• Discussion of Proto-Indo-European roots for “us/we” pronouns, with technical breakdowns of reconstructed forms; another commenter asks for sources and gets standard references.
• There’s debate over whether some Old English forms are “false friends” with German; others argue they’re genuine shared Germanic inheritance.
• A phonological law (loss of /n/ before fricatives) is cited to explain English “us” vs German “uns” and similar pairs (mouth/Mund, goose/Gans).

Modern English workarounds for lost dual & plural ‘you’

• Several people feel something emotional is lost without dual forms (e.g., “the song of the two of us” reads weaker than the Old English nuance).
• Others note that English still has constructions like “you two / us two / we two” and “both”, which can cover much of the same function.
• A long subthread covers plural “you” workarounds: “y’all”, “all y’all”, “you guys”, “you’uns/yinz”, “yous”, and dialectal “dees/thas”.
• Teachers describe practical ambiguity in addressing a class; some insist context and names are usually enough, others find plural “you” forms genuinely helpful.

Pronoun systems in other languages

• Multiple languages are mentioned with dual or special number systems: Arabic (standard form keeps dual; most dialects have lost it), Russian and other Slavic languages (dual historically, remnants in number+case patterns), Slovene (fully productive dual with dedicated pronouns), Serbian/Croatian (semi-dual expressions), Irish (dual-like use with natural pairs).
• One commenter notes dual is often lost over time; no one can name a language where a dual emerged recently from scratch (flagged implicitly as unclear/unknown).
• Inclusive vs exclusive “we” is discussed via Hokkien and other languages; English lacks this distinction and instead relies on context or phrases like “present company excluded”.

Historical English pronouns, formality, and polarity

• English formerly had richer case, dual number, and T/V distinction (thou/you).
• There’s detailed discussion of the old four-way yes/yea/no/nay system, where “yes” and “no” either affirmed or contradicted a (non-)negative question. Modern negative questions and archaic “not” phrasing are seen as semantically tricky.
• Several Romance languages’ formal “you” (Portuguese “você”, Spanish “usted”) are traced back to respectful third-person phrases, paralleled with English honorific circumlocutions.
• Historical use of “thou” as informal and sometimes insulting is highlighted; some religious or regional uses survive or influence perception.

Singular “they” and pronoun simplification

• One thread laments the perceived erosion of pronoun distinctions, including the rise of singular “they” as obscuring number.
• Others counter that singular “they” for an unknown person has centuries of attested use, and that people already use it unconsciously (“someone left their coat”).
• There is disagreement over how continuous this usage has been and whether older literary precedent should matter; one side stresses actual current usage over prescriptive rules.

Wordplay, tools, and miscellany

• Several jokes connect dual pronouns to Git and pair programming (“you two add/commit/push”, “pair programming are wit”).
• Clarification that “git” the Old English pronoun and “git” the modern insult/tool name are unrelated homonyms, with different historical paths and pronunciations.
• Etymology of “halfwit” is clarified as coming from “wit” meaning mental ability, not the dual pronoun.