
Manners in Early Modern England - pulisse
https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/08/in-pursuit-of-civility-by-keith-thomas-review
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gadders
"Yet norms of civility also had another, more positive function. In an age in
which religious, cultural and political passions were even more extreme than
in our own, they enabled people to overcome deeply rooted and potentially
dangerous differences, to live harmoniously side by side, and to discourse
with one another without rancour, violence or abuse. Ultimately for Thomas
this is their more important and enduring purpose, as “restraint, tolerance
and mutual understanding” are the necessary preconditions for humans to
coexist and flourish."

Yeah, we could do with more of this.

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mercer
@dang: Any chance the url could be changed to the non-amp version?

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zone411
I'd also recommend "The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook
for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century" by Ian Mortimer.

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modells
My hypothesis on manners is that the strictness of norms are proportional to
hierarchicalness, and permissibility and propensity to violence.

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Nasrudith
That seems to map very well to feudalism and well blood feud cultures as well.
There was an interesting thing that happened in both Japanese and English
linguistically - both had 'ultrapolite' linguistic elements that were
discarded because they wound up used only mockingly/ironically when it went
from polite to refer to your superior using thee/thou as opposed to rude.
Thee/thou was transitioning to rude in Shakespeare's time and while Japanese
still has many formal pronouns the most extreme were reserved for historical
fiction, mockery, and the massively arrogant.

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vostok
> when it went from polite to refer to your superior using thee/thou as
> opposed to rude

That's fascinating. In my native language you would have been considered more
polite and thou would be for friends or equals.

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tdumitrescu
That is indeed how it was. "thou" was the familiar form in contrast to "you"
which was the formal form (see for instance the discussion at
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou)).
Modern English speakers typically hear "thou" as more formal because it only
persists in Biblical and similar archaic usages.

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eecc
The use of “thou” in the English translation of the Bible was made
deliberately to “lessen the gap” with the divinity (as opposed to the
incomprehensible Latin used by the Catholics.) Funny how that got lost and
it’s now perceived as old-fashioned submissiveness.

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groovy2shoes
As far as I can tell, the use of "thou" in the early (until about the 17th
century) English translations was to preserve the grammatical number found in
the Hebrew and Greek originals, which had separate forms for singular and
plural second-person pronouns. This was certainly the case in the Old English
translations, as well as in Wycliffe's Middle English and Tyndale's early
Modern English. When those translations were made, "thou" and "ye" were the
_ordinary_ English words that corresponded with the originals. It has nothing
at all to do with Latin.

At the time James VI/I commissioned his Authorized translation, "thou" was
already _starting_ to fall out of production, but was not something that
seemed foreign or archaic to English speakers, and he'd asked his translators
to follow the style of the existing English translations, which were by-and-
large based on Tyndale's. There are certainly some ways in which the
translation attempts to emphasize certain theological/christological
viewpoints, but the usage of "thou" is not one of them.

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pulisse
> There are certainly some ways in which the translation attempts to emphasize
> certain theological/christological viewpoints, but the usage of "thou" is
> not one of them.

It wasn't theologically neutral, though. To address God with the polite plural
form of the second-person pronoun suggests that the speaker is addressing an
entity that occupies a higher position in some kind of social hierarchy, which
implies that one's relationship to God is mediated by social structures. Use
of the singular form was considered more consistent with Protestant theology,
which emphasized a direct and individual connection between the believer and
their God.

You see the same phenomenon in German, a language that's retained multiple
forms of the second person. In German translations of the Bible, and in German
prayers, God is addressed as "Du" (the familiar singular "you").

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groovy2shoes
> You see the same phenomenon in German, a language that's retained multiple
> forms of the second person. In German translations of the Bible, and in
> German prayers, God is addressed as "Du" (the familiar singular "you").

You also see it in the Latin Vulgate, where God is addressed as "tu"
(singular), rather than "vos" (plural). My point is that the translation as
"thou" was more-or-less a direct translation of the original text in almost
all cases, preserving the distictions made in the Hebrew and Greek
manuscripts. At the time those English translations were made, the choice was
theologically neutral insofar as the original texts were theologically
neutral.

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woodandsteel
All those people who think we should go back to some earlier form of Western
culture try to make the manners back then look far better than they actually
were.

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lainga
This is off-topic, but I just wanted to highlight the following sentence:

 _[Thomas] reads everything. Not just the latest scholarship across
innumerable topics, but also theorists – whether Marx and Engels, Gramsci or
Bourdieu._

Zounds! Don't tell me he reads Lenin _and_ Kropotkin as well!

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jotm
What's wrong with that?

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btilly
All four named authors were communists. In attempting to demonstrate
diversity, they accidentally demonstrated the opposite.

It would be like bragging about the diversity of people that you listen to
today, and then listing Bill O’Reilly, Alex Jones, Sean Hannity, and Tucker
Carlson. Yes, that's a lot of work by a bunch of different people, but you're
not really getting exposed to the full range of thought in our culture.

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Nasrudith
It also doesn't fit in with even 'covering the high novelty/obscure ones' like
if he listed say Georgists, and Mercantalists, and Cameralists.

