Re: Interesting Pronouns.

On Mon, 7 May 2001 14:38:06 -0000, Bjorn Kristinsson <bjornkri@...> wrote:

>Ello y'all
>
>One of the things I generally find, well, dull in my conlangs are the
>pronouns. They're usually all three persons, singular and plural, possibly
>with added 'dual' pronouns[1], and possibly even 2 or more genders for
each,
>just to try and make things interesting.
>
>In short, they won't. The result is usually a fairly cluttered table of
>pronouns that don't make too much sense.
>
>So, what I was wondering is if you, my fellow conlangers, have any
>interesting/alternative ways of making pronouns (or perhaps not using
>pronouns at all) that you'd care to share?
A feature you may not have thought of or encountered is inclusive/exclusive
for the 1st person plural: inclusive means "you and me", while exclusive
is "me, some others, but not you"; this is a common feature in various
natlangs.

Minimalizing pronoun use is also a possibility, though not featuring them
at all would be very extreme; I gather many languages prefer to use
personal names and/or status-indicating nouns. So you might address someone
of higher status as "lord" or "elder" or "master" or whatever, and yourself
as "servant", "inferior", "slave", or something; and family members by
their position within the family (perhaps not relative, so that the mother
addresses her husband as "father" - isn't that done in some natlangs?); and
equals as "friend" or something; etc etc. I believe this lowered use of
pronouns is common in some real-world languages (Thai?).

A system I've often toyed with, especially for my more practically intended
languages, goes like this: there are forms only for the three persons; it
is possible to combine the forms with each other, or numerals (which would
include a "plural" numeral ">2"), so that to express 1p dual inclusive,
one'd say "ego tu" (using Latin pronoun forms for convenience), 1p dual
exclusive "ego is/ea/id", 2p plural "tu plus" ("plus" being the >2
numeral), etc. The advantage of this is flexibility, because it is then
just as easy to express something less common, such as 1p exclusive
duodecimal "ego is/ea/id 12", for example.

Kveðja,
Óskar

Replies