Re: Interesting vowel harmony system from Australia

On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 23:31:26 -0500, Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>
wrote:

> Doug Dee wrote:
>> I don't care much about the vowel harmony, but I was interested by the
>> statement in section 3.2.1 that "personal names cannot be used in
>> sentences."  I
>> wonder how they generally identify people without using names.
>
> A kind of standardized "nickname", or distinction between "public name"
> and "personal name", perhaps?  Probably occuring along with a preference
> for using titles such as "father", "shaman", "tribal leader", etc.
My immediate guess was that personal names can be used in isolation, they
just can't be incorporated into sentences, thus:

Fred. He's a good man.

John. David. He hit him.

I think it could be very easy for the native intuition to be that names
mentioned in this way aren't actually part of the sentence that follows
them. It could be equally easy for a suitably culturally-sensitive
linguist to accept this without a fight, and report it as fact.





Paul

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