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The royal we, majestic plural (pluralis majestatis), or royal plural, is the use of a plural pronoun (or corresponding plural-inflected verb forms) used by a single person who is a monarch or holds a high office to refer to themselves. A more general term for the use of a we, us, or our to refer to oneself is nosism .
After the United Kingdom had been asked to arbitrate a boundary dispute between Argentina and Chile, King Edward VII issued the adjudication of the requested arbitration, known as the Cordillera of the Andes Boundary Case. The sentence following the preamble of the award begins as follows: [1]
Now, We, Edward, by the grace of God, King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas King, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India, etc., etc., have arrived at the following decisions upon the questions in dispute, which have been referred to Our arbitration, ...
In this quotation, underlining has been added to the words that exemplify the use of the majestic plural.
The royal we is commonly employed by a person of high office, such as a monarch or other type of sovereign. It is also used in certain formal contexts by bishops and university rectors. William Longchamp is credited with its introduction to England in the late 12th century, following the practice of the Chancery of Apostolic Briefs. [2]
In the public situations in which it is used, the monarch or other dignitary is typically speaking not only in their own personal capacity but also in an official capacity as leader of a nation or institution. In the grammar of several languages, plural forms tend to be perceived as deferential and more polite than singular forms.[ citation needed ]
In diplomatic letters, such as letters of credence, it is customary for monarchs to use the singular first-person ( I , me, my) when writing to other monarchs, while the majestic plural is used in royal letters to a president of a republic. [3]
In Commonwealth realms, the sovereign discharges their commissions to ranked military officers in the capacity of we. Many official documents published in the name of the monarch are also presented with royal we, such as letters patent, proclamations, etc.
Popes have historically used the we as part of their formal speech, for example as used in Notre charge apostolique , Mit brennender Sorge , and Non abbiamo bisogno . Since Pope John Paul I, however, the royal we has been dropped by popes in public speech, although formal documents may have retained it. Recent important papal documents still use the majestic plural in the original Latin but are given with the singular I in their official English translations. [4] [ full citation needed ]
In 1989, Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was met with disdain by some in the press for using the royal we when announcing to reporters that she had become a grandmother in her "We have become a grandmother" statement. [5]
Several prominent epithets of the Bible describe the Hebrew God in plural terms: Elohim , Adonai , and El Shaddai . Many Christian scholars, including the post-apostolic leaders and Augustine of Hippo, have seen the use of the plural and grammatically singular verb forms as support for the doctrine of the Trinity. [6] The earliest known use of this poetic device is somewhere in the 4th century AD, during the Byzantine period; nevertheless, scholars such as Mircea Eliade, [7] Wilhelm Gesenius, [8] and Aaron Ember [9] claim that Elohim is a form of majestic plural in the Torah.
In Imperial China and every monarchy within its cultural sphere (including Japan, Korea, and Vietnam), the majestic imperial pronoun was expressed by the character zhèn ( 朕 , Old Chinese : *lrəmʔ). This was in fact the former Chinese first-person singular pronoun (that is, 'I'). However, following his unification of China, the emperor Shi Huangdi arrogated it entirely for his personal use. Previously, in the Chinese cultural sphere, the use of the first-person pronoun in formal courtly language was already uncommon, with the nobility using the self-deprecating term guǎrén寡人 ('lonely one') for self-reference, while their subjects referred to themselves as chén臣 ('subject', original meaning 'servant' or 'slave'), with an indirect deferential reference like zúxià足下 ('below [your] foot'), or by employing a deferential epithet (such as the adjective yú (愚), 'foolish'). While this practice did not affect the non-Chinese countries as much since their variants of zhèn (朕) and other terms were generally imported loanwords, the practice of polite avoidance of pronouns nevertheless spread throughout East Asia. This still persists, except in China, where, following the May Fourth Movement and the Communist Party victory in the Chinese Civil War, the use of the first-person pronoun 我wǒ, which dates to the Shang dynasty oracle inscriptions as a plural possessive pronoun, is common. [ citation needed ]
In Hindustani and other Indo-Aryan languages, the majestic plural is a common way for elder speakers to refer to themselves, and also for persons of higher social rank to refer to themselves. In certain communities, the first-person singular (Hindi : मैं, romanized: maiṁ, lit. 'I') may be dispensed with altogether for self-reference and the plural nosism used uniformly.[ citation needed ]
In Islam, several plural word forms are used to refer to Allah. [10]
In Malaysia, before the Yang di-Pertuan Agong takes office, he will first take an oath, in which the Malay word for 'we', kami, would be the pronoun used. This is because His Majesty represents the other Malay Rulers of Malaysia during his reign as the Yang di-Pertuan Agong.[ citation needed ]
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
Singular they, along with its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs, and themselves, is a gender-neutral third-person pronoun. It typically occurs with an indeterminate antecedent, to refer to an unknown person, or to refer to every person of some group, in sentences such as:
Judaism has different names given to God, which are considered sacred: יהוה, אֲדֹנָי, אֵל, אֱלֹהִים, שַׁדַּי, and צְבָאוֹת ; some also include I Am that I Am. Early authorities considered other Hebrew names mere epithets or descriptions of God, and wrote that they and names in other languages may be written and erased freely. Some moderns advise special care even in these cases, and many Orthodox Jews have adopted the chumras of writing "G-d" instead of "God" in English or saying Ṭēt-Vav instead of Yōd-Hē for the number fifteen or Ṭēt-Zayin instead of Yōd-Vav for the Hebrew number sixteen.
In linguistics, grammatical person is the grammatical distinction between deictic references to participant(s) in an event; typically, the distinction is between the speaker, the addressee, and others. A language's set of pronouns is typically defined by grammatical person. First person includes the speaker, second person is the person or people spoken to, and third person includes all that are not listed above. It also frequently affects verbs, and sometimes nouns or possessive relationships.
The T–V distinction is the contextual use of different pronouns that exists in some languages and serves to convey formality or familiarity. Its name comes from the Latin pronouns tu and vos. The distinction takes a number of forms and indicates varying levels of politeness, familiarity, courtesy, age or even insult toward the addressee. The field that studies and describes this phenomenon is sociolinguistics.
The plural, in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the default quantity represented by that noun. This default quantity is most commonly one. Therefore, plurals most typically denote two or more of something, although they may also denote fractional, zero or negative amounts. An example of a plural is the English word boys, which corresponds to the singular boy.
Capitalization or capitalisation is writing a word with its first letter as a capital letter and the remaining letters in lower case, in writing systems with a case distinction. The term also may refer to the choice of the casing applied to text.
In Modern English, we is a plural, first-person pronoun.
Elohim, the plural of אֱלוֹהַּ, is a Hebrew word meaning "gods" or "godhood". Although the word is grammatically plural, in the Hebrew Bible it most often takes singular verbal or pronominal agreement and refers to a single deity, particularly the God of Israel. In other verses it refers to the singular gods of other nations or to deities in the plural.
In Modern English, the word "you" is the second-person pronoun. It is grammatically plural, and was historically used only for the dative case, but in most modern dialects is used for all cases and numbers.
The Raja Permaisuri Agong, unofficially known as the Queen of Malaysia, is the consort of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong, the elected, constitutional federal monarch of Malaysia.
Al-Ḥijr is the 15th sūrah. It has 99 āyāt (verses).
Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person, second person, or third person. Personal pronouns may also take different forms depending on number, grammatical or natural gender, case, and formality. The term "personal" is used here purely to signify the grammatical sense; personal pronouns are not limited to people and can also refer to animals and objects.
In general, a Vietnamese pronoun can serve as a noun phrase. In Vietnamese, a pronoun usually connotes a degree of family relationship or kinship. In polite speech, the aspect of kinship terminology is used when referring to oneself, the audience, or a third party. These terms may vary by region. Many are derived from Chinese loanwords but have acquired the additional grammatical function of being pronouns.
The English pronouns form a relatively small category of words in Modern English whose primary semantic function is that of a pro-form for a noun phrase. Traditional grammars consider them to be a distinct part of speech, while most modern grammars see them as a subcategory of noun, contrasting with common and proper nouns. Still others see them as a subcategory of determiner. In this article, they are treated as a subtype of the noun category.
In linguistics, clusivity is a grammatical distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called inclusive "we" and exclusive "we". Inclusive "we" specifically includes the addressee, while exclusive "we" specifically excludes the addressee; in other words, two words that both translate to "we", one meaning "you and I, and possibly someone else", the other meaning "me and some other person or persons, but not you". While imagining that this sort of distinction could be made in other persons is straightforward, in fact the existence of second-person clusivity in natural languages is controversial and not well attested. While clusivity is not a feature of standard English language, it is found in many languages around the world.
Nosism, from Latin nos 'we', is the practice of using the pronoun we to refer to oneself when expressing a personal opinion.
Pronouns in Cantonese are less numerous than their Indo-European languages counterparts. Cantonese uses pronouns that apply the same meaning to function as both subjective and objective just like many other Sinitic languages.
The pluralis excellentiae is the name given by early grammarians of Hebrew, such as Wilhelm Gesenius, to a perceived anomaly in the grammatical number and syntax in Hebrew. In some cases it bears some similarity to the pluralis maiestatis or "royal plural". However the idea of excellence is not necessarily present:
Of (c): the pluralis excellentiae or maiestatis, as has been remarked above, is properly a variety of the abstract plural, since it sums up the several characteristics belonging to the idea, besides possessing the secondary sense of an intensification of the original idea. It is thus closely related to the plurals of amplification, treated under e, which are mostly found in poetry.
The T–V distinction is a contrast, within one language, between various forms of addressing one's conversation partner or partners. This may be specialized for varying levels of politeness, social distance, courtesy, familiarity, age or insult toward the addressee. The distinction occurs in a number of the world's languages.
In these letters the plural "We" and "Our" are employed instead of "I" and "My," and the letters terminate thus: "Your Good Friend." This form is used mainly for Royal letters to Presidents of Republics.