Comment on What would this list look like for your generation?
barsoap@lemm.ee 4 weeks agobecause it’s arguably a fourth person pronoun.
Even if you consider it a pronoun, which you’d then also have to do with “class” in “Class, please open the book to page 14”, it’s still second person plural.
Fourth person would be “One does not simply walk into Mordor”. “One does not address the fourth person”. I guess people got it mixed up with the 4th wall that’s why the confusion exists.
CoolMatt@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
I get 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person, but 4th person is a new concept to me and I’m trying tl wrap my head around it given your examples. This is intersting
barsoap@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
One refers to an indefinite and generic group, and it’s not a “they/them” in the sense that one does not exclude oneself from that group (it’s generic, after all). I guess universal quantification is close in meaning.
It’s a thing specific to English, or I guess Indo-European languages in general. All languages have first, second, and third person anything beyond that is non-standard. E.g. Finnish has a 0th person, “Infer who is meant from context”.