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Re: No pronoun, no article

From:Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>
Date:Saturday, October 18, 2003, 1:54
Paul Bennett wrote:
> Semantically, you're never going to be able to meaningfully do away > with the ability and necessity to link anaphoric content to the rest > of the sentence, but you may well be able to come up with ways to > hide the mechanism(s) deep in morphology.
Japanese treats pronouns as a subclass of nouns. Indeed, pronouns are often avoided with names or titles used instead, such that, for example, "sensei" can translate as "teacher", or as "I" (when used by a teacher to students), "you" (when used towards a teacher) or "he/she" (when used in reference to a teacher) Most pronouns are, in addition, historically derived from nouns, for example, _boku_ (casual male 1st person pronoun) originally meant "manservant" (and still has that meaning in compound words, altho I don't think it can have that meaning on it's own), and was originally a *humble* way of referring to yourself, but thru overuse lost its humility until it's now colloquial. _Omae_ (2nd person, familiar) meant "Honorable front" (that is, the honorable person before me). _Kisama_ (2nd person insulting) originally meant "Noble appearance". The 2nd person pronouns were originally honorific terms, which lost their respect thru overuse. _Kare_ (3rd person masculine singular, fairly familiar) originally non-gendered, is an old demonstrative meaning simply "that one". It became masculine in the late 19th century when translators created a phrase _kanojo_ (that woman) to translate "she" in Western languages. _Ano hito_ (a somewhat more polite 3rd person, non-gendered, pronoun) is literally "that person" Of course, origin and use of pronoun-like nouns aside, Japanese has words, such as "boku", "watashi", "anata", etc., which *do* function as pronouns, and can *only* be used as pronouns. -- "There's no such thing as 'cool'. Everyone's just a big dork or nerd, you just have to find people who are dorky the same way you are." - overheard ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-Name: NikTaylor42