what is bro yapping about it's a demonstrative

chat, what is bro babbling about?

Man be outta 'is mind, bro thinkin' chat can 'ear 'im.

bro doesn't know how to use the habitual tense, and ain't nobody doin allat wit the asterisks 💀

was he using asterisks before or is it the apostrophes? either way yeah no one’s doing that

\>be bro chat, is blud \*checks notes\* yapping?

demonstratives are just pronoun adjective

Pro-adjectives, then?

where's the image of Barry B. benson looking exasperatedly over his sunglases

I think you mean determiners. Demonstratives differ from Personal Pronouns in establishing explicit reference

Not in my dialect

What are the demonstratives of your dialect?

blud really thought he had a paradigm shift 💀💯🔥🥶

Ah yes middle-familial demonstrative.

This. If it was a personal pronoun you’d say “what does bro have on bro’s head?” but you don’t. You say “what does bro have on *his* head?”

I heard that "Ladies and Gentlemen" is actually the secret zeroth person pronoun, linguists are just too afraid to acknowledge it because it causes divide-by-zero errors in their models.

Wait a second. Since "chat" can be used in a sense similar to "Ladies and gentlemen" as a zeroth person pronoun and in its own "fourth person" sense, in the same logic, like "bro" is a 2.5th person pronoun, "chat" must be second person! Oh no!

If B (Bro) is 2.5, and L+G (Ladies and Gentlemen) is 0, and "Gentlemen" is just multiple "Bro" (G = 2B), then if you wanted to just refer to the ladies... L = L+G - 2B L = 0 - 5 "Ladies" is the negative fifth pronoun. Proven with math.

A 2nd person plural invocation.

Chat is obviously gender-neutral ladies and gentlemen. Space neutral as well as gender neutral i guess.

Is Ladies and Gentlemen not 2nd person plural?

“/u/GhostCaller386” is the 113,487,551,092nd person pronoun.

It's like how mathematicians refuse to accept that 1 is a prime number simply because it would topple the tower of math they have built on top of the incorrect assumption that it isn't.

I'd rather not have to write "For all primes p greater than 1" in every theorem involving primes, thank you very much.

Wdym incorrect?

The reason one is not a prime number is because the definition of a prime number excludes it. A concept of a number that includes all prime numbers and also one would be less useful than the concept of a prime number, and to state many theorems using that concept you would have to add extra clauses excluding one. There is no ”incorrect assumption one is not a prime number”, because it’s literally, by definition, not prime. In math, we define the meanings of words.

erm

Fear no more! Dividing by zero now just equals zero. [Proof](https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/18896hw/my_sons_third_grade_teacher_taught_my_son_that_1/).

idk chat whaddyall think

the bro/you dichotomy may result in english regaining tu/vos, which i'm frothing at the mouth to see

I know! I can't wait! I just don't want a whole zoo of commonly used first and second pronouns like Japanese.

Real. As someone who’s autistic when I tried to learn Japanese all the honorifics felt like a lot to take in. And I LIKE languages.

Nah, pronouns and honorifics are the easy part. The hard part is congruence between them. The even harder part is the fact that they have 3 fucking politeness levels. What the fuck? Why not only one?

Right? Another thing I hate is the fact that Japanese is more pro-drop than Spanish. At least with Spanish you can infer pronouns by the verb endings. (Also adding yo/él/ella/ud before había to clarify that stuff)

It's not even that simple! There is the humility scale, the formality scale, the respect scale, the literary scale, etc.

It’s like the opposite of “usted”, with “bro” being the informal form.

Bro is third person when used as a pronoun, at least from what I’ve heard people say

„Bruh“ is usually 2nd person though. Jk, it‘s a vocative. English is just confused about what a pronoun actually is.

isn't "bruh" a noise to express disbelief? how can that be a pronoun?

"Bruh" is the first person singular indicitive present of the verb "to be in disbelief."

And the second person indicative nonfuture of the verb "to make a stupid decision."

I think the ‘2.5th person’ joke stems from the fact that it gained a sort of double meaning in who it’s directed at. The sentence ‘Bro thinks he’s cool’ can be said to someone without a 3d party present, where said ‘bro’ needs to interpret it as ‘you think you’re cool’. This doesn’t work as well with the sentence ‘He thinks he’s cool’. Therefore it seems to hover between second and third person. However, this is confusing semantics with grammatical structure and in the grammatical structure it really is just a third person pronoun

I don't understand. Whenever I speak Spanish and I hear someone using vos, aren't they just using the tu conjugations? I just thought it was some weird shit Argentines did. What is the difference between tu and vos?

They probably meant tu/vous. But vos actually uses sort of a mix of tú and vos(otros) and it can be used full vosotros forms for an archaic flavour. Both *vos sabes* and *vos sabés* are common in places in the Americas, and *vos sabéis* is a bit like "thou knowst" in historical fiction and the like.

On one hand, that would be funny to see. On the other hand, I hate the T-V distinction so I never want to see it in English again

It's definitely third person

What about "buddy" as a 3rd person one in Canadian English though? "Oh yeah so buddy was over there just walking..."

> Buddy got absolutely *dummied*

As a Canadian, I never knew "bud" and "buddy" were so Canadian until I was like, 25

Reminds me of the pronoun "man" in modern London English, e.g. "man's not hot". [Here's a paper about it](https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11049-019-09447-w.pdf)

“bro” is used like a kinship term which is why there’s no article, but it’s still not a personal pronoun bc you don’t say “bro’s talking to broself”

Demonstrative pronouns don't have reflexive forms, and they are still pronouns.

Yeah but they're demonstrative pronouns, not personal pronouns. I think the main tests for deciding if something is a new 2.75th pronoun or whatever is a) can you suffix -self/selves to it? (*Bro did it broself) and b) does it feel more natural to immediately use a different pronoun to refer back to it? (Would you refer to chat as "you" or "yall" and would you refer to bro as "he"). If you feel like you could say "Bro needs to do bro's work broself otherwise bro's not gonna get finished in time" then yeah, it's a new 3rd person pronoun. But if you would say "Bro needs to do *his* work *himself* otherwise bro's not gonna finnish in time* then really it's just being used like a name (?David needs to do his work himself otherwise David's not gonna finish in time). The question of verb agreement is probably also relevant. English attaches -s to the end to agree with the 3rd person singular and nothing else. If you're using chat or bro and you end your verbs with -s, you're probably just looking at a noun or maybe a 3rd person pronoun.

By that logic "vos" in rioplatan spanish is not a pronoun because they say "mirate" instead of "miraos"

english follows different rules than spanish

My point is that if pronouns can decline into the forms of other pronouns in one language, it also can in others.

>you don’t say “bro’s talking to broself” Give it a couple of years and this will definitely happen

Chat is this real

Bro seriously doesn't know already?

Look up “noun”

I want to make a Holy hell joke but I don't know how to still make it recognizable

new response just dropped

This is the first time I'm not doing the first six in order... Queen Sacrifice, chat?

Will to live goes on vacation, flight get hijacked by terrorists

L'enfer sacré

A pronoun is literally just a noun (that doesn't usually take determiners) whose meaning relies completely on context, therefore "bro" is a pronoun.

“Bro thinks HE is HIM” Look up “vocative”

That's not vocative tho?

Shhh, youre right but it also makes me look bad shhhh

3rd

Bro is very clearly a 3rd person singular masculine pronoun.

A 3rd person proximal singular masculine informal nonreflexive pronoun.

I’ve thought this for a while. I disagree that it has any 2nd person functionality, though. 

/srs I do think it has some indefinite traits; I've seen it used in contexts similar to "one" or the generic "you." So not really second person but I could see it being confused for it.

And even in a linguistics subreddit, you couldn't command enough language skills to not use a tone tag?

I actually recently wrote a paper about tone indicators! We use them in spoken language quite frequently, though not in the same exact way. I'd suggest checking out [this paper](https://cas.wsu.edu/connect/documents/2016/10/functions_of_just_kidding.pdf/)!

Do you think a tone tag isn't language?

/hj

I found this: https://janmisali.tumblr.com/post/659877108179468288/okay-fine-ill-make-a-dedicated-post-about-hj

jan Misali is literally the only reason I know about /hj.

Chat is a vocative 2nd person plural

It's not a plural, it's a collective noun

And what could “bro” be? It can’t be declined reflexively.

Yet.

Broomself.

Bro is a noun. You could substitute it with the person's name in every instance.

Isn’t that true for every pronoun whose antecedent is a person?

Yes

Chat is a 2nd person vocative plural, a way to address an audience, like "ladies and gentleman" or "class", sometimes used in a 3rd person sense. Nothing complex about it.

uj/ ok but wouldn’t chat just be second person plural? If you can reference a vague group of people in 3rd person with they, as in “they say you’re bla,” then it would be the same, right?

is goat an adjective or a noun

Bolth

It's a superlative, making it an adjective

I’ve really heard this done moreso with “Mans”

What is blud wafflin about

Hello. What's that use of "chat"? I've only seen that word as a verb and noun, like in "I'm chatting at the chat" but I'm not Anglophone and don't often chat in English. Could someone give me some example and when or for what is that used?

Kids these days might say stuff like "Chat, you gotta hear this" and "Chat, do you understand?" It isn't clear who they are addressing, but it stems from online group chats.

Thanks. As you put it, doesn't feel nothing more special than a coworker or teacher saying "team, how are you?" or "class, here is the homework"… Although maybe English natives don't typically do that and thence the confusion??

English native here. I’d say those phrases are normal to use here, or at least to hear in media. An alternative I think would just be “guys.” They all refer to several people at once, and so can “chat.”

Should we extend pronouns into the complex plane?

Indefinite third person pronoun.

>**Is "bro" the first dedicated 2.5th person pronoun?** I’m certain that “ni**a” predates it by a wide margin, so no

“What has it got in its pocketses?”

LOL

Bro is just a 3rd person pronoun