Re: THEORY: The fourth person

Danny Wier wrote:

>From: "Jean-François Colson" <fa597525@...>
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>>From: "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...>
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>>>Lots of languages have something like it.  I can't actually speak
>>>to how they work in Athapaskan languages, but in Algonquian languages,
>>>there are specific verb forms for an unspecified and generic entity
>>>(noted as "X").
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>>Is that somewhat similar to the French pronoun "on", the German "man", the
>>Dutch "men", etc.?
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>I don't think so in the case of French; don't know about German or Dutch.
>The French pronoun _on_ corresponds to third person masculine singular; the
>verb is not conjugated any differently than if the subject was an _il_ or
>_elle_. But I could be wrong. French verb grammar behaves as though it wants
>to be an Amerind language. (Or should I say, French is essentially a Romance
>language with Algonquian verb grammar?)
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>I wonder if there could be such thing as a FIFTH person... maybe in
>bitransitive verbs, like something translating to "he sent him to him"?
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Oh, and while we're on the subject.  Another person I've seen called
'the fourth person', is often called the 'third person obviate'.
Essentially, there is the proximate third person, who represents the
main character in any given narrative or sentence(depending on the
language), and the obviate third person, who represents the incidental
character(s).  There's a whole section in Mithun's 'The Languages of
Native North America' on 'fourth persons'. (Languages with the
proximate-obviate distinction are mostly in the Algonquian family.)

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