Re: Amerindia [was: Re: Workshops Review #7]

Joseph Fatula:

> > What is the Navajo fourth person?
Eamon Graham:

> It's a pronoun that has a wide number of uses, especially cultural,
> including use in polite language and to indicate "highly topical or
> psychologically remote referents."  I personally enjoy it because
> you can say a sentence like "he knows he's fat" and disambiguate
> whether the second "he" refers to the first "he" or someone else we
> were talking about.
Which is très cool. I have a proximate/obviative in my Amerind
conlang Piata. Which is what you're talking about above. But
I didn't stop at an obviative (or second third person). I also
have a *third* third person, or "farther obviative" (which I
shamelessly stole from some Algonquian language, might have been
Cree or Ojibwa -- or possibly both. :)

The nearer obviative would be used in expressions as:

     i) the chief's horse:NEAR-OBV.

And the farther obviative would then be used in expressions as:

     ii) the chief's son's:NEAR-OBV horse:FARTHER-OBV

I'm not sure if this is how I'm going to use it yet. But this
is how I saw it used in that Algonquian language.

Possessives, btw, are formed with the formula

     iii) the chief his-daughter = "The chief's daughter"

which in Piata would be _chahta fa-nuehsha_.

I really ought to write things like this down in my slowly
progressing grammar, instead of keeping them in my head. :)

Daniel Andreasson

--
http://www.conlanglinks.tk

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