Re: Pronoun systems, Texperanto, ANADEW (was:Re: Mixed person plurals)

Hello, Rex, and thanks for reading and writing.

I have enjoyed what I have found about Texperanto, and would like to
learn more.

Hello, everybody else, too.  Thanks for writing.

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Rex May <rmay@M...> wrote:
> Interesting and surprising that the vowel-anaphora of Texperanto
> would be
> taken as gendered pronouns of some sort.  Of course, they are not
> intended
> to be such,
Nevertheless, I think, unless I misread or misunderstood him, Corbett
would say Texperanto has 26 (?) 'sub-genders' (probably not
full 'genders') which are morphologically-based (as many are) rather
than semantically-based (as most are).

Sounds like Texperanto's main, full, 'genders' are semantically-based;
two of them are even sex-based, male and female, while the third
seems to have 'inanimate' as its semantic core.  I am not sure about
Texperanto; do other words get assigned to these genders based on
their morphology rather than their semantics, as happens in French
and many other languages?

According to Corbett, in most gendered languages, most genders have
a "semantic core", together with other words which are assigned there
because their morphology is similar; then there is one (or sometimes
a few) gender(s) that contain the 'semantic residue', whose only
membership requirement is that the noun not belong to any other
gender.  However, some languages have some genders whose membership
is determined entirely by morphology; for instance, what might
otherwise be the 'semantic residue' might be split into two or more
genders by morphology.

Corbett gives an example of Russian as having masculine, feminine,
and neuter genders; and each of them has animate and inanimate
subgenders.  The subgender governs agreement of fewer things in fewer
circumstances than the gender does; I don't remember the details, but
he has clearly stated criteria for when something is a gender, when
it is a subgender, and when it is an agreement-class that really you
shouldn't concern yourself about too much when you are trying to
think about 'gender'.

According to Corbett, 'gender' is something about a noun that governs
something about something else.  The first letter of a Texperanto
noun governs the "initial-anaphor", if that's the term, used to
anaphorically fill-in for it.  Since that's all it governs, it's
probably a sub-gender instead of a gender (by Corbett's definitions
and terminology).  Since it depends entirely on the form of the noun,
not a bit on its meaning, it is morphophonetically determined rather
than semantically determined.

It may be surprising, but I think it's consistent.
For me, the trick was to quit thinking of 'gender' as 'sex' and start
thinking of it as 'agreement class'.

That divides the human species into probably 100,000,000 genders or
so, since so few people 'agree' with so few other people.

(Alright, so, that last sentence was a joke.)

>  but are derived from 1. The Loglan/Lojban/Ceqli use of vowel
> anaphora, and 2. the usage in several languages of initials to
represent
> words, usually people. "M. B lived in Paris..." etc.
>
> If you read further, you'll see that other third person pronouns
> are available.
> Er(i) for males, in(i) for females (sex, not gender),
Really making Male and Female Subgenders of your Human Gender.

Unless words like "Loer", "Loin", "Lieri", "Liini" (if these are
barbarisms or solecisms for acceptable forms, please correct them for
me) can be used with "my black tomcat", "my Airedale bitch", "my pack
of foxhounds", "my mares" respectively, as antecedents?

> and forms like lo, lu, li, lui,
Your pronouns' basic gender system is Human vs Nonhuman.
Lu -- Human Singular
Lui -- Human Plural
Lo -- Nonhuman Singular
Li -- Nonhuman Plural
(though your description makes "Li" sound like Inanimate Plural)

> and the same four prefixed with i, a, and o (here, there, yonder),
Three degrees of demonstrative distance from speaker?

ilo == this thing
alo == that thing
olo == the other thing?

> giving at least sixteen more pronouns available.
> So there's actually no need for further rules at this point.
I think your rule of prefixing the initial-anaphor to what would
otherwise be the pronoun; or, if you want to look at it the other
way, suffixing the ordinary 3rd person pronoun onto the initial-
anaphor; counts as a 'rule'.

I think, together with that pronoun-compounding 'rule' mentioned in
the last sentence, you would be correct in saying I, personally,
probably wouldn't need any further rules to make use of Texperanto's
pronoun system.

> Texperanto's  pronoun system, I think, is as complete and
> unambiguous as any  language's is so far.
How does it compare with Fijian's 156-pronoun system?

> In a situation where:
>
> Petero kai Patriko donis plumo ad Penelopeo.
> You likely would not say
> P kai P donis P ad P.  You'd say:
>
> Lui donis P ad in.  Or
> Lui donis lo ad in.
>
> And if there may be confusion between Karlo and kreyono,
> they can be
> referred to as K-lu (k-person) and K-lo (k-thing).
Thanks for clearing that up.
I think that neatly answers the problems John Vertical pointed out.

It does cause me to wonder what happens to J-Lo in your alternate
universe.

> The extended pronoun system is one of the reasons why only a
> few hundred  thousand people speak Esperanto,
> while nearly a billion speak Texperanto
> (in an alternate universe, it must be admitted).
Where can I find more about this alternate universe?

Thanks,

Tom H.C. in MI