Joe Mondello <Rugpretzel@...> wrote:
> I have been toying with the idea of putting the following system in my
> conconlang: adjectives whose meaning changes based on the traits of the
> speaker. e.g:
[snip]
> perhaps this system will not work out as well as I have planned, but I
also
> plan to forbid it in speaker-unknown situations. does any such system
already
> exist in a natlang?
The closest thing I can remember is the pairs of Japanese nouns
for relatives, which depend on the speaker; some are related to
each other and some aren't. For example:
mago "(my) grandson"
omagosan "(your) grandson"
haha "(my) mother"
okasan "(your) mother"
And then there's the "corresponding gender" in Hawaiian. Straight from
J. Henning's "Model Languages":
"... the Hawaiian word kaikaina means "younger sibling of the same sex
as the referent". So a man's kaikaina would be his younger brother;
a woman's kaikaina would be her younger sister."
Something like could be regular in adjectives. You could have (say)
an age adjective which meant "of the same age", and a negative
inflection which turned it into "not the same age". If English has
a phrase for it, another lang *could* have a single word.
--Pablo Flores