Jorg and Joerg wrote:
Dutch | German | English ik | ich | I kan | kann | can mijn | mein | my pdf | pdf | pdf niet | nicht | not openen | öffnen | open
kunt | kannst | can u | du | you mij | mir | me hierbij | dabei | with it helpen | helfen | help
Correct! ("Können Sie" instead of "kannst du" but that's
really minor
detail).
Is it similar to the English "you can" where there is no difference between singular and plural? I thought about it and "kunt u" sounds more like the German singular.
English "you" = singular OR plural, but there is also an archaic singular form "thou", though you can use it as a joke - every native English speaker knows it. Like "vosotros" in Latin America.
So it would be more like the German:
Dutch | German | English
kunt | kannst | canst u | du | thou
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou
I don't know why we lost "thou". But now in parts of the USA "you" is strictly singular, and the correct plural would be "Can y'all help me open my pdf?'. I'm not sure how widespread this usage is, though it's certainly more common than "thou"!
Interestingly enough, I recently heard that "thou" used to be more informal than "you" when they were in simultaneous use - don't know how reliable the source was.
Geoff
