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The use of the word you is considered a show of respect and courtesy towards the elderly or people with high social positions; It is even used to mark verbal distance with the interlocutors. In letters and other documents it is customary to abbreviate it in different ways, including “You”.
Etymology
Despite addressing a second person, the personal pronoun “you” is grammatically part of the third person, both masculine and feminine; this is due to its etymology. Usted is an abbreviation of a courteous address used in the past: your grace (Vd.). Its origins date back to colonial times, when it was common to refer to people who were esteemed in this way or to those who thought they were. It started as a highly formal type of reference and later became the standard way to address people in higher positions, as well as people who are not friends or family.
The meaning of its abbreviation
As is often the case with the most commonly used terms, vuestra merced , whose meaning is “your mercy,” has been shortened over the centuries. Changed vuesarced to vusarced and eventually to vusted , which you may still hear, especially among older speakers in some regions. Accordingly, Vd. was adopted as an abbreviation for that word or earlier forms and remains in use today, although Vd. is more common.
Spanish speakers tend to smooth their consonants, so vusted eventually gave way to today’s usted (which in some areas has its last letter smoothed to sound like you). Like the previous vuestro merced , ” you ” uses verbs in the third person, that is, it is used for formal language as opposed to the ” you” of the second person and used in more familiar or informal language.
Types of abbreviations
There are 2 different types of abbreviations:
Truncation : It is due to truncation or trimming when the last letters of the word are removed to make the abbreviation.
Contraction : When the most relevant letters of the word are used to make the abbreviation.
private use of you
Some Castilian dialects, such as variants of Colombian Spanish, are characterized by their ustedeo, that is, a prominent use of the pronoun usted , even above tú . This ustedeo can occur between close people such as family and friends, as a form of familiarity, contrary to how the pronoun is usually used in other places. Ustedeo is the equivalent of voseo in places where it is more common to use vos than tú , such as in River Plate Spanish or in the Spanish of the Zulia state in Venezuela.
References
- Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts (2005). Royal Spanish Academy. Consulted in July 2021 at https://www.rae.es/dpd/usted .
- Etymologies of Chile . Consulted in July 2021 at http://etimologias.dechile.net/?usted .
- Lindgård, A. The familiarity you in Colombia (2016). Accessed July 2021 at https://munin.uit.no/bitstream/handle/10037/10985/thesis.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y .
