To tu or not to tu

For those of us who come from a country whose language doesn”t have the polite ”you” form, figuring out when to use the familiar form of you – tu, or when to use the respectful form – dumneavoastra, in Romanian, is at best, unnerving. We Brits would rather die than commit the ultimate social faux pas of being impolite, so how does it work? How is it defined? How is it that what comes naturally to the majority of the 800 million odd people living in Europe in their languages, has us Brits stuttering incoherently to mask our ignorance?

As far as I can work it out, there are a couple of hard and fast rules – dumneavoastra with the elderly, with those in authority and with those who you consider, or who consider themselves, on a higher evolutionary plane than yourself such as a boss; and tu with children. But pretty much everyone else seems to be in this huge, murky, grey area.

Dumneavoastra, I”ve observed, is a fairly safe bet when talking to someone for the first time or if you don”t know them well, whether they”re the wife of the boss of the company or a policeman trying to practice his already masterly grasp of the art of extortion on you, for a very minor misdemeanor on your part. So really it has little to do with respect – the point an English friend made – if you”re going to have a respectful form, surely the respect has to be earned first, rather than just assumed.

So is it then partly to do with not knowing someone well enough to use the familiar form? This also doesn”t seem cover it really. I”ve observed amongst middle aged people that often 2 colleagues who have worked alongside each other day in, day out, for the past 20 years will persist in dumneavoastra-ing each other. Why? There seems no logical reason – both are a similar age, position, status etc. Could it be that in this instance it is almost used as a weapon – like the Brits with their ”please”s and ”thank you”s? We use them so profusely, they”re automatic and we”d never dream of omitting them; rather the tone of voice expresses the intent, including rage, exasperation etc. So is it then that the 2 work colleagues are inherently saying to each other ”I may have known you for ever but you”re no friend of mine”?

It also seems to be partly a master/servant class thing. Your staff will call you dumneavoastra and you in your turn will call your boss dumneavoastra. But what if a staff member is significantly older than his or her boss? What takes precedence then, age or career advancement? Where do we stand? All sorts of complications could arise, and indeed do in the tiny, uninitiated brain of the Brit trying to muddle his way through! And how is it then that my landlord, who employs a handyman, brought in whenever anything from the plumbing to roofing etc. needs fixing, both dumneavoastra each other? They”ve worked together for years and they”re a similar age. And anyway isn”t the whole master/servant thing rather outmoded in the 21st century?

With friends it”s tu, that”s clear. Or is it? Let”s assume a foreigner comes to Romania (here we”ll have to assume he”s not a Brit, because a Brit wouldn”t have bothered learning the language). He knows no-one and thus he dumneavoastras everyone he meets, possibly with the exception of a life-form even lower than himself; his secretary. As he meets new people, in a social setting, we assume that with some he will be on a tu form term. These friends will in turn introduce him to others but how is he to know which form to use with these new acquaintances? They”re effectively strangers so dumneavoastra would be appropriate, but meeting in a social setting so tu would surely be more natural. But then there”s further potential for complications – does the caliber of these new acquaintances count? If they”re business friends, particularly if higher up the achievement ladder, should he use dumneavoastra, whereas if they”re social friends, will tu do? And going back to the secretary, if he meets her family, which he is almost invariably going to do as Romanians are so fabulously welcoming to foreigners, why should he dumneavoastra them, as he will indeed be expected to? Ok, they”re strangers but he”s bound to be older than they are and hierarchically considered more accomplished, being the boss.

Oh, it is an absolutely lethal tightrope of potential foot-in-mouth syndrome. Personally I feel uncomfortable with being dumneavoastra-ed, it implies some sort of superiority where none is deserved – we”re all people. But it seems you can”t escape it – once someone has decided that”s how they should be addressing you, no amount of asking, begging, coaxing or pleading will have them switch to tu.

It makes you appreciate how lucky we are in English. Even the helicopter-owning, manor house-dwelling, local squire will be known to all as Mike or George or whatever his name might be – his gamekeeper might call him ”Guvnor”, but only for effect. And even the Queen is just plain old ”you”.

Possibly it highlights the inadequacies of the English language, although with a vocabulary of over 600,000 words recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary, it”s generally not considered inadequate but rather one of the richest, if not the richest language on Earth. Or possibly it highlights the archaic attitude of the majority of mainland Europe in insisting on clinging on to effectively an outmoded class system.

So, Romanians please don”t be offended by our inadvertent slips, we”re really not trying to deliberately insult – we just honestly don”t get it! And sincerely we mean it when we say ”drop the dumneavoastra”.

* Claudia Leslie has been in Romania for 8 years. She is co-owner of Portobello bar in Dorobanti and is currently helping to organise a benefit concert for children with HIV/AIDS for April 2006