Re: No pronoun, no article

On Sunday, October 19, 2003, at 01:13 , David Peterson wrote:

> Both my conlangs Njaama and Zhyler have no articles at all.
Yep - as very natlangs function very nicely without articles, there
must be a large number of conlang without them also.

IIRC the 'philosophical' conlangs of the 17th century, e.g. Dalgarno's
"Universal Character" and Wilkins' "real Character" had no articles.
Certainly Foigny's "Austral language" possessed no articles.

I'm fairly certain Volapük didn't have them.  Certainly BrSc (whatever
form it eventually takes and name it is given) will not have them.

> Both have pronouns though (though in Zhyler, they're only for the first
> and second person, and they're used sparingly).
Yes, pronouns are such useful things that I suspect there are few conlangs
that lack them
entirely

I suppose Latin had only fully developed personal pronouns for 1st & 2nd
persons. For
the 3rd person only the reflexive 'se' existed.  The non-reflexive 3rd
person forms were
supplied by a fairly rich set of demonstrative pronouns.  But tho not
personal pronouns,
these words are, I guess, to be classed as pronouns.

I'm not entirely certain, but I understood Remi Villatel's "Both at the
same time?"
to be asking if a conlang had both features [i.e. lack of pronouns & lack
of articles]
at the same time.  Mark Line's Classical Yiklamu, which John Cowan has
already mentioned,
came to mind immediately, as did also Tom Breton's "Allnoun". Neither
conlang has pronouns
or articles.

Ray
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