Talk:His Majesty

Moved fro Tea room --Expurgator t(c) 18:12, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

I have had a crisis of confidence! What part of speech is His Majesty, Your Excelence and the like? Noun, Proper noun, Proper pronoun?? SemperBlotto 08:11, 18 October 2005 (UTC)
 * It's a pronoun in fact. There is no such thing as a proper pronoun. Fowler calls it a "royal pronoun". For the record, I believe that "proper noun" is as useless as "noun phrase". The former is as visible by its uppercase first letter as the latter is by its containing spaces. &mdash; Hippietrail 17:04, 18 October 2005 (UTC)
 * If it's good enough for Fowler, it's good enough for me. SemperBlotto 17:10, 18 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Proper nouns aren't proper nouns, in the way that they cannot (normally) be in plural, etc. Jon Harald Søby 17:13, 18 October 2005 (UTC)
 * It's true they seem to have some restrictions but last I checked our definitions didn't enter into this but merely mentioned the case of the letters. In any case I'm sure there are Andrews and Jons besides the two of us who know about keeping up with the Joneses, or who watch The Simpsons. &mdash; Hippietrail 15:56, 21 October 2005 (UTC)
 * I have always parsed this as simply a pronoun + an abstract noun.  If you treat it as a pronoun, and "your majesty" becomes synonymous with "you", surely you lose the original point which was to refer not to the person directly but to their majesty.  For some reason it has always been considered polite to refer to important people indirectly or in the third person (Spanish usted is not wildly dissimilar). Widsith 15:39, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Maybe that was the original point, but this expression is now a pronoun (or a pronomial phrase, if you like). &mdash; Paul G 14:18, 9 March 2006 (UTC)