Re: Person marking on nouns?

On Sat, Feb 21, 2004 at 03:45:17PM -0500, Estel Telcontar wrote:
> I got thinking recently about wat if there wer a language that markt
> person on nouns, indicating the person-ness of who or what it referd
> to.
>
> Most nouns woud have third person marking, indicating that they refer
> to neither speaker nor audience.  So in a sentence like "The cat is on
> the mat", both nouns woud be in third person (assuming you'r not
> talking ta the cat.)
>
> First person marking on a noun woud be used wen a noun refers to the
> speaker - for example, in translations ov the expression in the Old
> Testament where one refers ta oneself as "your servant" when addressing
> a superior, such az God or the king.  Thus, in the instance where the
> boy Samuel sez ta God in one ov the first chapterz of 2 Samuel "Speak,
> for your servant is listening":  here, a translation in this language
> woud have (your) servant markt with first person marking, indicating
> that wen Samuel sed "your servant", he was refering ta himself.
[snip]

Now, that is a VERY cool idea... because this would explain the Ebisédian
pronominal system perfectly. The Ebisédian pronouns, excepting the 1st
person singular, do not have personal distinctions, but rather have an
"intimate" vs. "distant" distinction. E.g., the feminine intimate pronoun
_jubi'_ could either mean the 2nd person (you, fem.) or "she" (3rd
person). Conversely speaking, if the speaker were addressing a woman, he
could either refer to her as _jubi'_ (intimate) or _jhiti'_ (distant),
depending on whether he regards her as close to him. In this context, the
pronouns could be translated as "dear you" and "you stranger",
respectively.

The same two words can be used to refer to a 3rd person; so _jubi'_ could
mean "she, the dear one" and _jhiti'_ could mean "she, the stranger".

So essentially, Ebisédian's pronouns are just normal words meaning "dear"
(intimate) or "stranger" (distant), except used in a pronominal sense.
I.e., they are used just like your person-inflected nouns, except that the
person inflections have null morphemes.

I first got this idea from Japanese, where it is common to not use
pronouns but use a title like "teacher" instead. Ebisédian simply pushes
this to its logical conclusion in completely losing pronouns and adopting
the most common of these titles in the pronouns' stead. In fact, I could
see how the Japanese convention could be extended to include personal
endings, so for example you could say "teacher-2p, student-1p forgot to
bring the book".


T

--
"No, John. I want formats that are actually useful, rather than over-featured
megaliths that address all questions by piling on ridiculous internal links
in forms which are hideously over-complex." --Simon St. Laurent on xml-dev