Darf ich Sie tuer?
For various early morning brained reasons I was considering the use of formalised language in German and French this morning. In my youth I was touted to be a linguist, a label that I have since managed to remove, tear up, burn and bury under a pile of tongue tied and stuttering rubble, but I am still fascinated by the French and German use of tu/du/vous/Sie to indicate familiarity as well as plurality when referring to people as “you” – if you know someone or are talking to someone younger/’lower in status’/etc than you then use tu/du and if you are being polite/formal/talking to someone of ‘higher status’ then use vous/Sie.
A few years after I stopped learning German I discovered that the Germans, ever inventive with their language, had a special word to describe the using of du to refer to someone as you – duzen. It was even listed in the random article I was reading with the polite way of asking someone if it was alright to call them “du” – Darf ich Sie duzen – a phrase that I love for its formality while asking someone if you can lower the level of that formality.
It’s not unusual for early morning preparing for work activitivies to get my brain spinning on issues of language – years ago, while walking to the station to go to work, I had a long and one sided conversation with my erstwhile flatmate Dave about how to translate ‘We Will Rock You’ into French. “Nous vous rockerons certainement” was where we got to, ’se rocker’ being a verb that I am both proud of and expect the Academie Français would have me strung up for. So this morning I had a bit of a think of what the equivalent for duzen would be in French – I came up, logically, with Tuer.
Which means ‘to kill’.
Update: Thank you people who have told me the real french word – it is indeed tutoyer.
Random Posts
Posted: September 29th, 2009 under blog.
Tags: french, german, language
Comment from Melinda Seckington
Time 29th September 2009 at 12:36 pm
In Dutch we have kind of the same thing: ‘jij’ as the familiarity ‘you’ and ‘u’ as the more formal one. (sidenote: extremely annoying for an English speaking kid to learn, when do you ‘know’ somebody well enough to use the less formal term?).
The difference between the Dutch and the German though (not sure about the French) is that in Germany it’s disrespectful to use ‘Sie’ with your parents (you’re in a way then distancing yourself from them). In Holland some parents require it from their kids (not everyone, but even now I still know people who do use this).
The Dutch equivalent of ‘duzen’ is ‘tutoyeren’, which I think is taken from the French. Meaning it would be ‘tutoyer’ in French? There’s also the opposite ‘vousvoyeren’.