Re: Second person/polite pronouns (fuit Re: Another Ozymandias)

On Thu, 27 Jul 2006 11:41:49 -0400, Sally Caves <scaves@...> wrote:

>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Paul Roser" <pkroser@...>
>
>
>> I can easily envision a polysynthetic language where person & number
>> marking are on the verb and pronouns have dropped from the language
>> or evolved into something else (but what? emphatic markers, perhaps?),
>> and I'd be willing to wager that there are natlangs that have gone
>> to polypersonal marking of the verb with only pronouns for speech
>> act participants, but I'm having difficulty envisioning a language
>> with a pronoun that doesn't distinguish person or number...
>
[...]
> I guess a conlang could do the same, using context, and specify only
> animate and inanimate in its pronoun.  Pronouns usually do have
> antecedants.
On the analogy of Swedish reducing all verb forms to third person pointed
out by BP previosuly in this thread, what I was thinking of was a language
that has reduced *all* pronouns to one form - which would probably render it
useless, though the notion of a pronoun that distinguishes only
animate/inanimate is intriguing.

And that reminded me that the (extinct) Lardil ritual language Damin has
only two pronouns corresponding to 'I/us' and 'other', so that's probably as
close as any natlang comes to bleaching pronouns (which is stretching things
a bit, since Damin isn't considered a true natlang).


-Pfal