Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

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

From:Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
Date:Sunday, January 25, 2004, 19:03
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