Re: TRANS: Happiness (& a question for Christophe)

En réponse à Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>:

> >
> Mais oui.  :-)
>
:)

>
> I'm reminded of Magic: The Gathering cards I've seen printed in
> Korean,
> and it's fairly hilarious because the Korean used is about as formal
> as
> you can get, even though it's a game that I can almost guarantee no
> native
> Korean over the age of 20 would be playing...^_^
>
:)))

> >
> That's cool.  :-)  Now, would things like pets and deities be counted
> as
> non-I or non-persons, or is the question not even relevant?
It is relevant, but difficult. I guess it would depend on the point of view of
the speaker. The priest of a certain deity would always use the "non-I" person
when refering to it, even though s/he would not always talk to it, for
instance. Pets would be considered like humans I guess. Of course, I know
pretty much nothing about the Dhastem (the speakers of Astou).

  Does it
> have
> plurals?
"non-person" doesn't mark singular or plural (at least on verbs. it doesn't
have personal pronouns but uses the demonstratives which do mark singular and
plural). "non-I" is not marked for singular or plural, but is more reserved for
singular (in fact, used to refer to a group, it refers to it as a collective,
rather than as each individual of the group). Even "I" can be used for a group,
when the speaker means that he speaks for all the group, and not only for
himself (while he can use "non-I" to refer to the group he's part of, to mean
that he doesn't mandatorily agrees with the common opinion of the group). Astou
does have plural personal pronouns though, but they are more boring, and less
used. They are the 1st inclusive, 1st exclusive and 2nd person plural. They
don't really parallel the use of the other pronouns, and are more reserved for
legal documents, where more precision is needed. Most of what is known about
Astou comes from written documents though, so nobody really knows what was the
everyday use of the pronouns.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.