Romance demonstratives (WAS: Just a Little Taste of Judean(Part 2))

FFlores wrote:
> What was _ipse_? I was under the impression that it meant "same",
> "self-" (Spanish/French _se_?) but I can't figure out how that
> could evolve to mean "that".
It originally meant something like "that very", that is, it emphasized
the noun.  I.e., "ipso facto", "by that very fact".  It gradually
weakened to just "that".  _Se_ is unrelated to it.  _Se_ (and _su_) go
back to the Latin reflexive forms.  Latin had two ways of indicating
third person possessive, there were the genetive forms of the
demonstratives, especially _is_, with those, the gender depended on the
possessor.  There was also the genitive form of the reflexive pronoun,
this was to indicate that the subject of the sentence was also the
possessor, i.e., "he fed his [his own] dog" vs. "he fed his [someone
else's] dog".  That form was the only one that survived in all (?) the
Romance langs.

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