I had this brought into sharp relief recently when I was reading Italo Calvino&#x27;s <i>If on a Winter&#x27;s Night a Traveler</i> (which has become one of my favorite books, coincidentally). There was a passage about how the &quot;formal you&quot; became an &quot;informal you&quot;—something that doesn&#x27;t happen in English.<p>This passage, no matter how it was translated, would inevitably be jarring in English in a way that it wouldn&#x27;t in Italian or even when translated to some other language which also makes that grammatical distinction.<p>Not that I&#x27;m complaining: if anything, it fit perfectly in a book as meta as <i>If on a winter&#x27;s night</i>. It certainly made my experience deeper. But it also made it different than it would have been in other languages which makes you think...