Spanish possessive adjectives and menus

On the Language Log Mark Liberman has found a Spanish menu. Such things are notorious, as I have described (here and here), but this has a new twist with squids in his (her, your) ink. As Mark points out, this is ‘the delightful consequences of someone's earnest reliance on a bilingual dictionary’, but how has it happened?

While English has separate possessive adjectives (his, her, its) for the three genders of the third person, Spanish has only one: su. On the other hand, unlike their English counterparts Spanish possessive adjectives change according to the number, and in some cases the gender, of the thing that is possessed: mi libro is my book but mis libros is my books, and nuestro/s libro/s is our book(s), but nuestra/s casa/s is our house(s).

The problem is that su corresponds to the three English third-person forms, but where does the your come from? In Spanish the polite form of address is usted, which takes a third-person verb because it is a contraction of vuestra merced, which is like Your Worship. Thus su/s is your (singular or plural you) as well as his, her and its. As well as that, it is also the possessive adjective for the third-person plural corresponding to their so in this menu Calamares en su tinta should be Squids in their ink. It follows that Spanish su/s has five English equivalents: his, her, its, your (polite) and their. Not surprisingly, this causes difficulty for Spanish-speaking learners of English.

Comments

[John Cowan]

In the street Spanish of New York City, because tu madre is short for a variety of well-known mortal insults, even speakers who normally never use usted for anybody automatically express 'your mother' as su señora madre, literally 'your lady mother', or even more literally 'her ladyship [your] mother'. Sometimes this carries over into English too.

[Peter Harvey]

Interesting. I didn't know that.

[John Cowan]

Strindberg's play is usually called Miss Julie in English. But in 19th-century Swedish, Julie is called Fröken because her father is a nobleman, and the translation really should be Lady Julie.