The Wonder of "You"

Very rarely do I complain about the Romanian language. I seldom have reason; it is, outside of French and Spanish, probably the language closest to English out of all possible Peace Corps countries. The ability to use much of my grammar and vocabulary from years of French and Spanish and adapt them to Romanian has helped me immensely with my ability to communicate. For instance, take the English and French word, "adaptation," and replace the -ion with -ie, and you have the Romanian word, "adaptatie," which means the same thing (due to limitations with the Internet, I am leaving out an important change to the second "t," which adds the equivalent of the French cedilleВ to it, but this change becomes automatic after a month or two of Romanian).

One of the things that has been difficult for me to grasp, however, has been the difference among the various formal and informal forms of "you". If one has spoken only English in one's life, it is easy to take for granted only one form of "you". But in Romanian, there are four forms of "you": tu, dumneata, voi and dumneavoastra.

The simplest and most casual is tu. This is used among friends of all ages, and young people, even when the young people are just meeting. It signifies a very close and casual relationship. Parents use it with their children, but children might or might not use it to address their parents. My 25-year-old English-teaching counterpart, Domnisoara Svetlana, and I are the only two teachers with whom students would ever even think of usingВ tu, and although it doesn't necessarily bother us, other students will usually quickly correct the student who used tu, and the student who used it might blush. Only twice have I told a student to not use tuВ with me, mostly because on each occasion, the student was being a punk. I used tuВ with my Costesti host parents (ages 40 and 34) without problems, and I might have surprised my Mereseni host parents, who are 15 years older, by using tu so quickly. But their adult sons use it, so it's not a real problem.

The next-easiest word to understand is voi. This is used to address more than one person, usually informally. This, like vosotrosВ in Spanish and vousВ in French, is equivalent to the Southern y'all. As tempting as it is to teach my students y'all, I have refrained.

Now, the ever-present dumneavoastra. Literally, it means "your lordship," which in my mind originally gave connotations that one would only use it with a work superior, the elderly, police officers and the president—although I'd probably use tu with Bush, just to piss him off. Basically, anyone with whom we would use "sir" or "ma'am," we should use dumneavoastra.

Well, my original understanding was way off. Now I know to basically address anyone over the age of 30 as dumneavoastra, and to not expect it back. You should use dumneavoastra with shop clerks, waiters and your work colleagues. I use it with all but four teachers at the school, and the only time I didn't use it with a waiter was with a 16-year-old kid whom I was telling to cancel my order because everyone else at the table had finished eating and my lasagna had yet to arrive.

As if the rules of dumneavoastraВ and tuВ weren't complicated enough, out of freaking nowhere comes the obscure and almost completely unusable dumneata, which is in the middle between dumneavoastraВ and tu. This is going completely overboard with degrees of formality, and I refuse to discuss it or understand it.

It is strange to be expressly told your status with a person based on the personal pronoun they use, and I personally don't like it. In high school in America, I was friends with a girl for years and often talked to her parents, not knowing whether to call them by their first names or their last names. When they moved to England, I even visited them there. To my knowledge, I never called them by either their first names or their last names, and yet I was able to have many conversations with them without having that part of our relationship established. I just used "you". If this scenario were carried out in Romanian, however, I wouldn't be able to conjugate a verb without knowing whether to use the formal or informal.

The strangest transition for me was when I began to speak on the phone with my Peace Corps boss in Romanian. Until September, I had spoken with Nina only in English. When she called one day and we spoke in Romanian, I was forced in the first two minutes of the conversation to decide how to address her. I used tu. She still talks to me, and I didn't suddenly age 200 years and decompose in a corner, leaving only my swastika pin and a beautiful screaming blonde, so I guess I chose wisely.

When it comes to "you," users of the English language are like hobbits. When I read the linguistic appendices of TheВ Lord of the RingsВ in September (yes, I have that much spare time), I discovered that in the Common Speech from which the trilogy is supposedly "translated," there are formal and informal forms of "you" that are impossible to accurately express in English. Hobbits, being the carefree and naive bunch they are, only use the informal form, and are probably never educated about the formal. In The Lord of the Rings, this created situations when hobbits rode up to kings and immediately addressed them using the informal forms. A king who was not so worried about destroying the Dark Lord might have put those hobbits in the stocks, but these kings were a linguistically understanding lot, and laughed about it.

Try as I might to explain to Moldovans that we Americans, and especially we Californians, are very informal, no Moldovan who hasn't studied English has been as forgiving as those kings. And so I tell them, "Poftim. Luati pronumele dumneavoastra," which means, "Here you go. Take your pronoun," using, of course, the dumneavoastraВ form.