Re: Person marking on nouns?

E fésto Christian Thalmann <cinga@...>:
> If you have verb inflections, you can use those rather than noun
> affixes:  "Speak, for your servant am listening."  My conlang
> Obrenje does that, especially for expressing grammatical number,
> to which verb inflections are insensitive:
>
> |Lonnaze.| {sing:1}  "I sing" or "We sing".
> |Lonnaze nae.| {sing:1 all}  "We all sing."
> |Lonnaze cene.| {sing:1 the:single}  "I alone sing."  (That sounds a
>     tad strange in English, but it's not quite the same as "I sing
>     alone".)
>
> Does anyone know whether this is legal in Latin?  |Loquere, nam
> servus tuus audio|?
The Vulgate has "te dices loquere Domine quia audit servus tuus" in 1
Samuel 3:9.

In many languages I think though it is possible to use 1st or 2nd person
verbs when they construe with the speaker or the listener ("Our Father,
which *art* in heaven"), it usually isnt (Your Majesty *is*; Your Honor
*doesn't*, your servant *hears*, Usted *quiere*, o senhor *vende*...).

But this is possibly because once you start addressing people with nouns
rather than pronouns you've ventured into polite speech, where such
obliqueness might be preferred.  Alternatively, you might say that
everything other than the first and second person _pronouns_ are third
person by default.  Otherwise, you know, the English be-clitics ('m, 's,
're) pretty much satisfy what the original poster was looking for.



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