Re: Is it necessary to distinguish inclusiveness in possessive markers?

Quoting Trebor Jung <treborjung@...>:

> Merhaba!
>
> I guess sg/pl for 2p is unnecessary, so it's scrapped now.
Early in my conlanging career, I too had a tendency to scrap unnecessary
things. The result was langs like Tairezazh, which, for instance, is pretty
clinically free of agreement (the exception being the reflexive pronouns ste-,
which agrees in number with the subject). Pronouns are somewhat of an
exception, since they sport a variety of decidedly unnecessary gender forms in
the third person.

Later conlangs of mine tend to include plenty of decidedly unnecessary things,
like genitives agreeing in case (Meghean) and gender inflection on verbs
(Kalini Sapak). These little inefficiencies tend to be the bits of the langs I
like best.

To each his own, I guess!

> I think of 'fourth person' as being 'someone unknown or distant' -
> http://home.bluemarble.net/~langmin/navajo.htm
Why not?

The usage I'd come across was for an "alternate 3rd" person, used to
disambiguate "he[1] took his[1] knife" (3rd, 3rd) from "he[1] took his[2]
knife" (3rd, 4th). Also from some American Indian lang, IIRC.

                                                   Andreas