« Vous » — making a comeback?

There's been a lot of talk on the news lately about vouvoiement vs. tutoiement — the formal French pronoun vous vs. the more familiar tu, either of which can be used to say "you" to someone. Roughly, you say vous to strangers and people of greater age or authority compared to you, and you say tu to friends, family, children, and animals.

The new minister of education under President Sarkozy is known to favor a return to the use of vous by teachers to address their students starting in the equivalent of the first grade. In nursery school, according to a May 20 article in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro, it is normal for teachers to address their pupils as tu, because there is a certain amount of affection between teacher and pupil. But most students learn to say vous to their teachers while they are in primary school and make the transition from pupil to student.

Some teachers continue to say tu to their students into high school, however. Those like the minister of education who would prefer that teachers always address their students as vous say it's a question of respect. But those who disagree say that's a smokescreen — there's nothing disrespectful about a teacher addressing a student as tu, says the national secretary of one of the big teacher's unions.

One sociologist, Jean-Pierre Le Goff, proposes banishing tu from the schools starting in first grade. He says the pronouns of address should be used "symmetrically" — students should say vous to their teacher, and teachers should say vous to the student.

The article cites the case of a private school in the Lot-et-Garonne department (southwestern France) which teaches 6th grade through graduation. Students and teachers are required to address each other as vous, and the students wear uniforms. If a student addresses a teacher as tu, he or she is punished. The student might have to sweep the classroom, for example.

An article in the next day's Le Figaro newspaper says that the new education minister believes that vouvoiement of teachers by students is indispensable, but he has no plan to make it compulsory for the time being. He says he would prefer that teachers say vous to students as well.

I don't know what percentage of teachers make a habit of saying tu to their students. Maybe you know...

Cueillez (cueille ?) dès aujourd'hui les roses de la vie...

In other words, stop and smell the roses... today.

On another front, the Figaro reports that the new president's first cabinet meeting broke ground in a couple of interesting ways. Nicolas Sarkozy announced that an "informal debate" on a current issue would take place at each week's cabinet meeting.

For as long as anyone can remember, Le Figaro says, cabinet meetings have been divided into three parts: (A) a review of proposed laws and executive decrees; (B) nominations and personnel matters; and (C) announcements by the different ministers. Now there will be a part (D) — D for debate or discussion on a topic chosen by the president.

The informal debate at last week's cabinet meeting concerned the whole question of overtime work and pay, which is important and controversial since the French government imposed the 35-hour work week a few years ago. Some of the new ministers and sub-ministers said they were thrilled to be able to express their opinions for the first time. "For the first time, there is a real dialog" which is "dynamic" and "energetic," and there's a spirit of teamwork, some of them said.

Sarkozy and his staff apparently cautioned the members of the cabinet to be careful to make sure they have something intelligent to say during these informal debates, and the president asked them not to use the time simply to ask for more resources and leeway for their ministries and departments. "What is interesting," said one of Sarkozy's spokespeople, "is to have an exchange of views on the fundamentals and the principles of an issue, so that each minister won't just be taking positions on matters that concern her or him most directly."

Meanwhile, Sarkozy plans to further relax government protocol. His predecessor, Jacques Chirac, had taken the step of no longer requiring that the prime minister accompany him to the airport each time he starts an official trip and meet him at the airport when he flies back to Paris.

Sarkozy decided to continue this direction and set the example by actually calling some of the new ministers by their first name during their meeting. But, the Figaro article points out, he refrained from addressing any of them with the familiar tu, and all of them said vous to him and addressed him as Monsieur le Président.

Millepertuis or Saint John's Wort grows wild along our side fence

On radio and TV shows this week, I heard commentators and satirists remark several times on the fact that former President Chirac and his wife Bernadette have always addressed each other as vous, at least in public. One commentator wondered out loud if they really resisted calling each other tu in the boudoir.

Callie prefers to be called tu and toi, despite her pedigree

Another radio chronicler talked about a Figaro article that I can't find and that told the story of a man, a "commoner," who had married a woman of the old nobility, a countess. He opined that he himself thought it was better for parents to say vous to their children because it would teach them respect and responsibility.

The radio personality said he figured those were the kind of parents who kissed their children once on the cheek when they were newborns and once again when they succeeded in getting their master's degree at the university. They wouldn't waste affection on kids. "You'd think that man was of the nobility himself," the commentator said, "because intelligence like his is usually the result of centuries of inbreeding."

Neighborhood get-together (2)

The neighborhood party was this past Saturday night. Here's the first installment.

Joining us for the evening with the three J's were the G's, who live next door to them. They had invited us all for drinks at their house a couple of weeks ago, if you remember.

The G's are nice people we've known since we moved into the neighborhood (the hamlet) more than three years ago, and we see them off and on but not very frequently. Mr and Mme G are both about 60 years old and have children and grand-children who don't live here. It seems funny to call them Mr and Mme G, because we know them by their first names, and we say tu them, not vous.

Our house, one of the newer ones in the hamlet

Vous and tu always comes up at these events, one way or another. I say vousto all these people, with the exception of the G's. But first names are used liberally. Mme J, at age 84, seems to enjoy being called Madame, which is pretty formal in this kind of situation. She is very vieille France — "old-school" — people tell me.

Another guest, P, who I will describe later, kept saying tu when she was talking to Mme J, and then correcting herself with a great flourish and considerable to-do. She called Mme J by her first name, but when she said tu to her "by accident" she would apologize and then repeat her sentence using vous. I thought it was a little over the top.

At one point, late in the evening, P did her "tu-oops-I-mean- vous" trick one more time and it caused some confusion. Mme J lost track of the subject or didn't understand P's question, and it showed. The youngest J told her grandmother that P didn't know whether to say tu or vous to her.

"Would you mind if P said tu to you instead of vous, Mamy?" youngest-J asked. Mais pas du tout, Mme J said — not at all. But she didn't say it very loudly; it was almost an aside. I heard it. It seemed clear to me that Mme J would be fine with the tu from P.

Well, P didn't pick up on it at all. She was adamant that vous was the proper form. "It's a question of age and respect," she told me. "I would never permit myself to say tu to [Mme J]," she said, using Mme J's first name. "I owe her the respect of the vous because of her age."

Maybe P wanted to be begged to say tu, but I don't think Mme J is the kind of person who would do that. She seems to be a reserved, dignified person, and not especially warm. As I said, I think she enjoys having people her daughter's age, like me and P, call her vous and, in my case, since I don't know her at all, Madame.

You understand that the tu/vous interactions are one of the things that interest me most about these get-togethers with our French neighbors. Another thing that interests me, of course, is learning more about the history of La Renaudière and our village. A third one is the hear what people have to say about the upcoming French presidential elections, and candidates Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy... about which more later.

The house across the street where the three J's live

Back to the G's: Mme G still works, while Mr G retired from his job a couple of years ago. They were at last night's party with their four-year-old grand-daughter, so they didn't stay long. We had thought the J's would have the same kind of party the G's had — a glass of wine, a piece of cake, and you're out the door after a couple of hours. But this was a real party, not just a before-dinner drink.

The G's have an old farmhouse that they have restored over the past three decades. They haven't always lived there, but now they do. Mr. G's job as a bank manager took them away to live to Chartres and other "far-away" places over the years, while they continued to fix up their old house (which is named Les Ruines, as ours is named Les Bouleaux — The Birches).

Another couple there were the people who live directly across the street from the J's. The S's don't live in their house yet; they still live in the Paris area, and she works. His mother, the elder Mme S, who is 93 years old, recently moved out of the house and now lives in a retirement home. Her house, which her son and daughter-in-law are planning to keep and not sell, is actually the oldest house in our hamlet, La Renaudière. Ours is one of the three "new houses" in the hamlet; it was built about 40 years ago.

So Mr. S and his wife were here for the weekend. She teaches school in the suburbs of Paris. When she told me that 90% of her students are "foreigners," I asked for clarification. "They are young people who were born in France, aren't they?" I asked her. Yes, she said. So what she meant is that they students are not ethnically French. Their parents are immigrants.

The S's live in the northeast suburbs of Paris, in a département called La Seine-Saint-Denis, which is département number 93, or, in current slang, le neuf-trois. That's the area where the riots started in 2005.

Mr. S is already retired, and I didn't find out what he used to do for a living. They have their house up north of Paris, they said, an apartment somewhere in the South of France, and now this house at La Renaudière, which they say needs major renovations.

With Mr. and Mme S was a woman in her late 70s who smiled and shook hands with everybody but who never really entered into any of the conversations going on in the room. She was probably Mme S's mother, but I say that only because I thought I saw a family resemblance there. Walt said he didn't see or notice it.

I wanted to mention that none of these people comes off as especially well-to-do, in my opinion. and certainly not wealthy. Dress is casual, with men wearing corduroy slacks or even jeans and open-collar shirts. Most all of the women were also wearing slacks or jeans. It was comfortably informal, the way a similar gathering would have been with our friends in San Francisco or Silicon Valley.

It's especially interesting that almost everybody at the party once lived and worked in the Paris area, including Walt and me. The S's still do.

The S's and the G's left the party at about 9:30 or 10:00 to go home, with the four-year-old grand-daugher in tow on one side and the older lady on the other. At that point, another woman at the party, P, who was the person I had been talking to most of the evening, pulled me aside, and then pulled Walt aside, and asked us to stay on for a few minutes after the others left. Walt and I had been ready to say au revoir and make our exit, but we had to stay at that point.

More on pronouns + a weather report

The situation with tu and vous in French is more complex than I used to think. For example, when I worked in Paris, years ago, the people I worked for called me by my first name but said vous to me. I said vous back to them, of course, and I called them Monsieur X or Madame Y. They were a generation older than I was, and they were professors while I was just a teaching assistant.

In other words, used of first-name forms in French does not necessarily correspond to uses of tu in the place of vous.

In Washington, where I worked with a group of French translators, we all called each other by our first names, but we all said vous to each other. For them, I think, that was the "American way" to do things. Some of them were my age, and some were older. Only the head translator was addressed as "Madame Y," in English and in French.

The translators were being less formal than they would have been in a similar work situation in France. Another concession to American conventions was the fact that we didn't all shake hands in greeting each other when we got to work in the morning.

I'm sure that thou, thee, thy, and thine correspond not just grammatically to the French tu forms, but also in usage. They are the second-person singular form, the one parents would have used in talking to their children.

The second-person plural you was the formal, not the familiar, form of address in older (and some current but archaic) dialects of English. Think about what we call the "royal we," which is the first-person plural substitued for the singular I." That's a similar formal usage of the plural instead of the singular. Look at what Wikipedia says about the royal we.

It's interesting that Ginny (and I'm sure others) who speak American English perceive thou as a formal pronoun of address. That must be because it is used rarely, and because it's mainly used in religious contexts (Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done...). Look at what Wikipedia says about the English pronoun thou.

Whether or not you use a person's first name has long been the same kind of marker in American English as is the tu/vous distinction in French, I think. It seems to me obvious that saying you to a person in English doesn't necessarily equate to saying vous in French. I know, intuitively, that I don't say the equivalent of vous in English when I'm talking to my mother, my sister, Walt, or my good friends Cheryl and Ginny. But of course we say you to each other. That's the only pronoun available.

But I can also see how somebody who speaks French and starts learning English would get the impression that English-speaking people never say tu to each other and always say vous, with all that implies in a French socio-cultural context.

French and English really are two langues ennemies. They are so similar in so many ways, and so different in so many others. It makes it impossible to ever fully grasp and master all the subleties of one language when your native language is the other. Just when you think you've understood the differences, you find out it's more complex than you thought.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

It was snowing when I got up at 7:00 this morning, but very lightly. Now at 8:30 it has stopped, but the ground is lightly dusted. A lot of the rest of France is getting a lot more snow than we are, at least for now.

Yesterday the temperature hovered around the freezing point, thick gray clouds blew by low in the sky, and the wind fairly howled. But no snow.

A report on yesterday's TV news showed a foot or so of fresh snow on the ground in a place called Dompierre-les-Eglises, just 160 km/100 mi. south of Saint-Aignan. Apparently, yesterday's snow just missed us.

I heard on the radio earlier this morning that it was snowing in the Paris area and that the snow was slowly moving west. That could mean we'll get some more later today.

In English, is it tu or vous?

Imagine for a minute that you are teaching English to a group of students who speak a language in which you are forced to choose, often consciously, the pronoun — formal or informal — you will use when you speak to any other person.

French works that way, and so do most European languages. In French, you say tu, the familiar form, to one set of people, and vous, the formal pronoun, to a different set of people.

You don't normally switch back and forth, saying tu to a person on one occasion and vous on another. In fact, there is often a progression involved, from vous toward tu. Once you have stopped saying vous and started saying tu to a particular person, there's no going back.

In other words, the tu/vous distinction matters greatly. You can't just say whatever comes into your head. It is possible to mightily offend a person who expects to be addressed as vous if you instead say tu. And someone who expects you to say tu will be perplexed, have hurt feelings, or even be angered if you say the formal vous.

Another complication is this: Who decides? In most situations, if an individual says tu to another, the other ones says tu back. It's the same with vous. But there are many exceptions.

There are some stated rules, but the choice of a pronoun is more or less intuitive to French speakers. In only a few cases is the choice perfectly clear. You always say tu to children and animals (pets, for example). You always say vous to a stranger who is older than you are and with whom you are having an impersonal interaction, in for example a business or official situation.

But there are, for example, children who learn to say vous to their mother or father; sons- and daughters-in-law who always say vous to their parents-in-law; and students and teachers who say tu to each other.

Here's an interesting case. Roselyne, the bread lady who delivers our daily baguette de pain, has always said tu to me. I don't remember her consistently saying vous when we first started talking to each other. Maybe it's because she knows I am a foreigner and knows that English-speakers don't make the tu/vous distinction.

Or maybe she knows absolutely nothing about the English language. Maybe it's because we are out in the country, where most people seem to say tu to each other much more easily that in Paris or other cities. Maybe it's my age, and hers. I don't know. But at the same time, Roselyne calls me "Monsieur" — she always sings out "Bonjour, Monsieur!" when she drives up. I sometimes say just "Bonjour!" and sometimes I say "Bonjour, Madame!" Then we say tu to each other.

Once in a while, Roselyne will say vous to me, but I think she is talking in the plural in those cases — talking about me and Walt. "Qu'est-ce que vous faites de beau aujourd'hui?" — what are you two up to today? — for example. That makes it complicated to know what's going on linguistically, since the plural form is also the formal form. I think the no-going-back rule applies here. She says tu to me nearly all the time, and there's no reason why she would suddenly use the formal vous. It has to be the plural.

By the way, I don't know if Roselyne knows that I know that Roselyne is her first name. I don't know her last name. She probably doesn't know my first or last name. Or maybe she does. I know I have talked about Walt to her, so she must know his first name. Maybe he has mentioned Ken to her. All in all, our interactions are extremely friendly but still formal on some level.

You can read more about my experiences with tu and vous in Saint-Aignan by looking at this blog entry.

Now here's my question. When we say you to people in English, are we saying vous or tu?

Remember that all of us human beings look at the world through the filter of our own native language. If the language you learned from your parents requires the tu/vous pronoun distinction, it is hard to imagine or even accept the idea that a language can exist without that feature.

Maybe no language can.

Historically, English you is the second-person plural pronoun, exactly like French vous. So it would be normal for French-speakers to assume that we all go around saying vous to each other all the time. We are therefore more formal as a people (we Anglo-Saxons!), or at least the nature of our linguistic communication is more formal.

Do you think that's true?

Our tu form, thou — and thee and thy, which are the second-person equivalents of first-person me and my — disappeared from standard English centuries ago. Did English-speakers decide, as a group, that it was a bad idea for people to go around saying tu to each other all over the place?

What replaced thou when it disappeared? Assuming it needed to be replaced...