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The word for "we" in some languages. (Being Norwegian, I am giving more details of Norwegian dialects than of other languages' dialects.) Now let's see if I can explain this in a way that won't make linguists chew their arms off...: Pronouns are very basic elements of language, and are very often irregular. Now, in terms of meaning, English "we" and "us" are really the same word - only different grammatical forms... 1/* 3 comments
Another thing that has happened in several languages, is that w has become m - like in Western Norwegian. The reason is that verb endings have influenced the pronoun - Old Norse "erum vit" ("we are"/"are we") became "eru m(v)it". I expect something similar happened in Slavic and Yiddish. ...but I don't think that goes for any of the languages on this map (?) Also, in this map for the first time introducing Ingrian, Arbëresh, Griko and Meänkieli. (And my grandmother!) |
Gregory's Server
But "us" is not formed by conjugating "we" in a regular way - it is an entirely different word.
And this goes all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European language, thousands of years ago: The subject form was *wey and the object form *nsme (sort of, possibly, probably).
English, German, Norwegian etc. have inherited both forms, with more or less the same function.
But in the red languages, the object form took over the function of the subject form. Like latin "nos" and its descendants.