Re: No pronoun, no article

On Friday, October 17, 2003, at 03:40  PM, Remi Villatel wrote:

> Could you tell me the name of a conlang, where the pronouns are
> replaced by
> another grammatical mechanism? And the same about the articles? Both
> at the
> same time?
>
> I think that there are not much other options than a verbal
> suffix/prefix
> for a pronoun and a noun suffix/prefix for an article but I'm looking
> for
> examples.
Thagojian marks the person of verbs and the gender of nouns in a
formally identical way, with a set of suffixes. It also fuses case
and pronouns of non-Agent/non-Identifying roles and attaches them
between the end of the word and "actual" person marker.

Thus: (with apostrophe being an acute over the previous letter)

qan'kédët - Ancestor (as 3rd person)

qan'kédëp - Ancestorhood (as a concept noun)

qan'kédëmenet - My ancestor

qan'kédëseit - Your ancestor

qan'kédëtéfet - His ancestor

qan'kédëmenes - My ancestor (as 2nd person)

qan'kédëmenet téras's'eit - My ancestor goes

lhémën téras's'eismeit - He goes into the world

qan'kédëmenet lhémën téras's'eismeit - My ancestor goes into the
world

It's not exactly a system which does away with pronouns, though it
does kind of do away with articles. Articles such as "the" and "a"
(and a third article somewhere in between the two) do exist in
Thagojian, but they're only used where absolutely necessary.

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.




Paul

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