Why isn’t it ‘youm’ like it’s whom? I mean whom is ebbing out anyway, and common usage lets you off the hook currently by using ‘who’ instead. The trend is to make English as simple as possible, which is fine. It’s a little bit like turning fine art into cartoons, but if that’s where we’re going, fine.
But was ‘youm’ ever an option? You know, for when we use ‘you’ as the object.
“Oh Mr Darcy, to whom might you be referring?”
“Why no less of a lady, Miss Bennet. I mean only to refer to youm.”
“To whom?”
“To youm.”
Come to think of it, ‘you’ does a lot of heavy lifting in the modern cartoon language. We use it to refer to more than one person sometimes, and other times it just means one person.
In other languages, the distinction is clear: tu peux chanter, mademoiselle! Mais, monsieur et madame, ne pouvez-vous pas écouter la mélodie fantastique?*
In Northern Ireland and some parts of Scotland, they get around this by saying ‘yous’ - which is a neat trick. Yous’ll have had your tea. I quite like this.
I think that’s the ebb and flow of the language actually - that balance between being complex and beautiful, or understandable and simple. That’s why I hope ‘whom’ is stuck in a holding pattern. English is so elegant and ornate because of its complexity, its fine brush strokes. But you can still use it to draw cartoons. Flexible. Brilliant. Changing.
All that being said, I’m not sure I’ll take up using ‘youm’ as the object pronoun for the second person. It occurs to me that when the candles on the birthday cake are lit and your face lights up in the dark, the last thing you want is me singing ‘Happy Birthday to Youm’.
*You can sing, miss! But sir and madam, can’t you hear the fantastic melody?
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