Re: THEORY: The fourth person

On 29 Apr 2004 <Trebor Jung <treborjung@...>> wrote:

> How do Uralic languages, for example, express this kind of thing?
  Hungarian does like Japanase in examples of Peter Bleackley. However,
I don't think this would be 4th, 5th and 6th person. We simply are
allowed to replace 3rd person pronoun with deictic pronouns (it's a bit
colloquial, though).

Látom o"t               --- Kare/Kanojo wo miru --- I see him/her
Látom ezt [az embert]   --- Kono hito wo miru   --- I see this person
Látom azt [az embert]   --- Sono hito wo miru   --- I see that person
Látom amazt [az embert] --- Ano hito wo miru    --- I see the person
                                                    over there

[O"] Lát engem --- Kare/Kanojo ga watashi wo miru --- He/She sees me
Ez lát engem   --- Kono hito ga watashi wo miru --- This person sees me
Az lát engem   --- Sono hito ga watashi wo miru --- That person sees me
Amaz lát engem --- Ano hito ga watashi wo miru  --- The person over
                                                    there sees me

-------

  But back to IE languagues :)) Macedonian postpositive definite
article has a proximal and an obviative form besides the general one:

chovek.ot 'the man' (in general)
chovek.ov 'the man here' (proximal)
chovek.on 'the man there' (obviative)

  A non-IE parallelism to the Macedonian is Basque (or inversely): it
has a proximal article in plural besides the general one:

mendi.a.k '(the) mountains' (in general)
mendi.o.k '(the) mountains here' (proximal)