this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
48 points (96.2% liked)
Asklemmy
53706 readers
1544 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Italian has a similar thing, where it uses the "her" ("Lei", often implied and capitalised when explicit) pronoun conjugation as a formal structure, regardless of the person's gender. From what the other Spanish commenters have said I would say it differs from it in that it conveys respect more than kindness, so it would sound weird in your context - but it might also be because I would translate the "command" version in the 2nd person plural and this only applies to the singular.
It used to be used with your parents not that long ago, that is almost completely gone now but it is still very common when talking to your teachers, businesses, officers, old people, in letters, etc. It is also the default between strangers, but that has been slowly changing since the 2000s. It's called "dare del lei" (lit. "To give the her"), and "possiamo darci del tu?" is a common question to "handshake" use of the regular 2nd person.
I'm super grateful for the explanation, does it make sense that I lack an adequate frame of reference for this? I did Latin many years ago, poorly. Since then it's been primarily English with a touch of guidebook Japanese phrases. I just don't have the mental agility to make the connections. But I am curious and when I am no longer working shift work I might delve into some language learning to improve the neural elasticity.
It does, it's a very weird thing if you're not used to it, you're not dumb or anything. I recognize it's a completely alien concept, there is no analogue in English, and it stacks on top of the singular and plural "you"s being different and having gendered words making it extra difficult to fully conjugate a sentence for speakers of languages that lack those features. But 90% of the time the meaning gets across anyway and we don't care :) (unless you're French /j)