Re: OT: Spanish pronouns ("usted", etc.)

On Thu, 17 May 2007 19:15:02 -0500, Eric Christopherson <rakko@...>
wrote:

>What kind of distribution does "menda" have? I assume you mean it's
>now used by non-Romani.
Yes. The DRAE tags it "colloquial" and "argot". Just like
other words of gypsy origin, it has a very informal feel
and always adds some emotional overtones which wouldn't be
there if one just said "yo", although these may vary with
context. For example, it frequently adds a sense of
self-confidence or smugness, even boastfulness.

Curiously, even though etymologically "menda" shares origin
in PIE pronominal forms with other 1st person pronouns like
"me" and "mí", in current usage it has become grammatically
more of a noun with pronominal meaning (not unlike Japanese
pronouns), while the opposite has happened with "usted" and
the other nominal phrases that contracted into grammatical
pronouns.

Another interesting aspect is that it can also be used
to refer to a third person, and sometimes who it refers
to is left entirely context while other times it is the
grammatical construction that implies the interpretation.
For example, when used without a determiner it clearly
means "yo":

A: ¿Alguien se queda?
B: Menda.

Sometimes the presence of a second determiner may shift
the meaning to third-person:

A: ¡Y este cochazo de quién es?
B: Del menda este.
C: Sí, del menda.

There, B is using "el menda este" to refer to C, while
C is using "el menda" to refer to himself. OTOH, I would
find a sentence like "Porque este menda no lo quiso"
ambiguous when taken out of context.


>So someone speaking on behalf of a group of all women might say
>"nosotros"? That's not the way I learned it, but that doesn't
>surprise me :)
Sorry, by "gender-neutral" I meant that it can be used for
groups that include women as well as men. The feminine forms
are gender-marked, in the sense that they exclusively refer
to groups of only women, while the masculine forms can be used
in a general sense without implying gender and, when referring
to a definite group, they merely imply there is at least one
male but do not preclude the presence of females (even of
a majority of females).


>But "él"/"ellos"/"ella"/"ellas" are used for masculine and feminine
>inanimate objects, right?
Yes, animacy is not relevant, only the gender of the noun (which
cannot be neuter). The usage of "ello" is very restricted. It is
used for linguistic abstractions such as referring back to what
one said in a previous sentence, and not in order to imply the
inanimacy of the referent nor for gender-neutrality, which is
also why it has no plural ("ellos" being the plural of "él"
and not of "ello").


>Is that a mainstream interpretation of the allophones? As I
>understand it, etymologically, "se lo" etc. come from ILLI ILLUM etc.
>by mostly regular sound changes, without avoidance of cacophony as a
>"motivation". On the other hand, if at some point both *"le lo" and
>"se lo" were available to speakers, they might commonly choose "se
>lo" for that reason.
Sorry, I meant it from the synchronic point of view of a native
speaker, not from a diachronical perspective of how it actually
came to be. From a synchronic point of view, the "se" acts as
a replacement for "le[s]" in such cases, and we native speakers
find it ugly how "le los" or "les la" would sound, even though
such would be the regular constructions. As such, it is the
common explanation given in school to explain the change, and
pupils easily agree: "'le los' would sound _ugly_ so we say
'se los' instead". Although probably it appears cacophonic merely
because of its unfamiliarity, because "it's not what one says".

Sure from a historical point of view it developed from the
archaic "gelo" from ILLI ILLVM, but that origin is completely
opaque from the perspective of the modern language. Digging into
the history of the language one finds different etymological
origins for the many uses of "se", as well as for the many
meanings of "que", but for a native speaker nowadays "se" and
"que" look like merely polysemic words rather than a collection
of homophones. That is, a native speaker perceives no fundamental
difference between the "se" in "se lo dije" and the "se" in
"se lo comió"; they seem to be different uses of "the same word"
and only by analyzing the semantics of the sentence one can
distinguish that the latter has a reflexive meaning and the
former stands for what should be "le[s]", a distinction that,
moreover, many native speakers would label "subtle". OTOH, we
easily perceive other homophones like "banco" and "vaca/baca"
as different words that happen to sound the same; probably
because these are lexical items and thus perceived to have
different "meanings", while "se" and "que" are mere particles
"without meaning" (in the sense of "without lexical meaning").