Re: THEORY: The fourth person

On Thursday, April 29, 2004, at 08:34 PM, Henrik Theiling wrote:

> Hi!
>
> Ray wrote:
>
>>> (e.g. as an inflection on the verb).
>>
>> But all the examples below have the same verb.
>
> Ah, I did not notice this when I wrote the mail. :-) Stupid me.  I was
> too fascinated by the polar bear.
Fascinating creatures - certainly ones that you need to keep on eye on, if
only to avoid being eaten  :-)
In fact, I find the penguins of the antarctic more interesting than the
bears of the arctic.

> Greenlandic has the same 4-person distinction it has for possessives
> in its participal, conjunctive and its three subordinative moods on
> verbs, where the 3rd reflexive then refers to the matrix clause.  The
> language marks both ergative and absolutive argument on the verb in
> all four persons and in number.
Right - I thought there was more to it than simply having different
possessive suffixes. As we've seen, many languages can and do make similar
distinctions. But the verb suffixes are distinctive. It would be nice to
have examples.

> I did not know Latin had these fine distinctions, too.  Nice.
> Probably I should have paid more attention at school. :-)
They're all possibilities to avoid ambiguity, but they operate within the
framework of 1st, 2nd and 3rd person verb suffixes only - no 4th person.
It seems to me that making a _grammatical_ 4th person distinction is only
valid if the behavior of the verb warrants it - not if the language
happens to provide you with more 3rd person and/or demonstrative pronouns
than the meagre selection we have in English.

> I remember that Swedish has 'hans bil'- 'his(other person's) car'
> vs. 'sin bil' - 'his(own) car'.
'sright.

Ray
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