Re: Person distinctions in languages?

Steven Williams wrote:
>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.
_____________________
The description of your proposed system sounds somewhat like my system for
Ithkuil, where discourse participation plus animacy/inanimacy are two of
several parameters which make up the personal reference adjunct system
(equivalent to personal pronouns in other languages).  For details, see
Chapter 8 of the Ithkuil grammar at http://home.inreach.com/sl2120/Ithkuil

--John Quijada

Reply