Re: No pronoun, no article

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.

--
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you just have to find people who are dorky the same way you are." -
overheard
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