Re: Person distinctions in languages?

 --- joao eugenio <joaoeugenio2003@...>
schrieb:

Both interesting ideas, but they still have to
describe things in terms of 'person'. I think I should
explain what I have, before anything else.

In this new conlang I'm coming up with, I'm trying to
figure out a way of dividing pronouns and verbal
inflections along the lines of discourse participation
and level of animacy; i.e., whether the thing in
question is involved in the discourse (1st/2nd person)
or not (3rd person) and its level on the animacy
hierarchy (deities/humans/predatory animals/prey
animals/plants/objects/etc). I'm sorely tempted to
scrap the animacy thing altogether and go with a
system that sort of mimics the Japanese classifier
system, which would be a thousand times less
ambiguous.

Examples:

'tsnare' - to hear
'-nak' - discourse participant, human
'-s(a)' - patient marker
'-a' - honorific marker

'tsnare nak-a-sa'

'[I] hear you'

And I disambiguate further using honorifics, something
like the Japanese using the '(g)o-' prefix to
distinguish between one's own family member and the
other's family members in discourse (or something like
that?)

Someone mentioned that Ebisedian has a strange
pronominal system; is there a website where I can see
examples?

> In portuguese, we have the three usual persons, but
> if we want to say something in the 2nd person
> (singular or plural), the verbs are conjugated as
> 3rd person. For the second person, we use the
> conjugation of the 3rd person, but we change the
> pronoun. Instead of "ele" and "eles", we use "você"
> and "vocês":
>  --- # 1 <salut_vous_autre@...> schrieb:
> In Spanish, if you don't use the pronouns and only
> use conjugation, using the 3rd person singular
> marker can indicates that it is a 3rd person subject
> (el, ella) or a respected 2nd person(usted)

	

	
		
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