You?

Question

How come there are so many words for you like tu, ti, and te? like te gusta is what do you like and por ti is for you. Why isn't it por tu? or por te? or tu gusta or ti gusta?
Can someone please tell me the difference between them. Thanks!

Answer 1

Any Chinese may ask you why do you have pairs of words such as "I" and "me", "he" and "him", "she" and "her", as in Chinese "I" and "me" are just one word, and they only have another word where English has "he", "she", "him", "her". Why "he" and "him"? Can you not say "I saw he" instead of "I saw him"?

The answer to your question is similar to that of the imaginary Chinese that I just made up, except for Spanish has an extra one to make further grammatical differentiations. "Ti" is used after most prepositions, and "te" is to "tú" what "him" is to "he", but for "you".

Answer 2

The reason that languages have different parts of speech is to help us convery our thoughts more clearly.
The te, tí, tu, and tú are all pronouns meaning you , or >

Tú is a personal or subject pronoun meaning you when it serves as a subject of the verb in a sentence, clause, phrase, etc.

tí means you when it is the object of a preposition.

tu means your when used as a possessive adjective.

Te means you when used as a direct object or indirect object of the verb. It also means you or yourself when used with pronomial verbs, reciprocally or reflexively.

There may exist some more arcane uses for the pronoun, but these are the main distinctions.

Answer 3

lazarus1907 said:

Any Chinese may ask you why do you have pairs of words such as "I" and "me", "he" and "him", "she" and "her", as in Chinese "I" and "me" are just one word, and they only have another word where English has "he", "she", "him", "her". Why "he" and "him"? Can you not say "I saw he" instead of "I saw him"?
The Arabic speaker probably wonders why only one word for 'you' instead of two (depending on the gender of the person addressed) although the distinction is made in the third person. Japanese, on the other hand, has about half a dozen ways of saying 'you'; not to show grammatical relationships but reflecting such things as age, gender, social standing (vis-a-vis the speaker), register, etc.

Answer 4

Yes, and in Japanese, there are many words for "I" (first-person subject pronoun), too: watashi, watakushi, atashi, atai, ore, boku, soregashi, ware, kotchi, uchi, and on and on. As you say (I'm saying this for others), the word selected will convey gender, age, and many other characteristics. Japanese gay men often choose to use feminine pronouns for themselves. Or not. In other words, choosing the pronoun can greatly affect the meaning and nuance of the sentence, and reflect on the speaker and listener. So a Japanese person learning English might wonder why we have only one measly word.

And of the many words for "you" in Japanese (many more than half a dozen), some can be used by themselves as an insult. If you menacingly say "temei" to someone, you might start a fight, even though all you have literally said is "you."

In short, it is often futile to ask why something is done differently in one language compared to another.