2721: How Spanish Created Its Own Pronoun Jun 2, 2024

There are parts of speech, known in linguistics as open lexical classes, where new words emerge constantly, like verbs and nouns, while closed lexical classes, like articles, prepositions, and pronouns, hardly ever change and are rarely if ever expanded. Spanish however invented a new pronoun [by pronoun standards] in the 17th century, ‘usted, ustedes’, from the phrase “vuestra merced” literally “your mercy” but functionally “your grace”, and like English’s “your grace” or “your majesty” etc. this is practically a second person pronoun, but grammatically acts like a third person pronoun. There are not direct parallels in other romance languages given the novelty of ‘usted’, but Portugese does have ‘você’ on the same basis, ‘vossemecê’ (your mercy), but this is rarely used, replaced in most situations by ‘o senhor’.