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

Dear List/Group: Sorry for the preceding post; I made technical errors due to
trying something for the first time.
Below is a copy of three e-mails between Rex May and me regarding pronouns in Fijian
(both Standard Fijian and Plantation Pidgin Fijian) and his conlang Texperanto.
They are in chronological order, first one from him, then one from me, then one
from him.
Some of the text is duplicated, but it is predictable, obvious, and not that much,
so I hope and believe it should be easy to skip and unobtrusive.
I hope you all enjoy them.
I will delete the former, much-harder-to-read post.

Tom H.C. in MI

Rex May <rmay@...> wrote:

On Aug 18, 2005, at 4:27 PM, tomhchappell wrote:

> Hi, Rex.
> Thanks for your post; I really enjoyed it.
> I only have a few things to say at the moment, and I think they would
> interest you more than the rest of the list, so this is going
> directly to you.
>
> 1) If we want to know what Corbett thinks about the gender of the
> Esperanto/Lojban "intial"-type anaphors, the thing to do might be to
> ask Corbett. (This may be obvious to anyone who thinks more clearly
> than I do.) Since there are now L1-speakers of Esperanto, I think
> this qualifies as a sci.lang type question, and he might not feel he
> was playing (conlanging) instead of working if he took the time to
> answer such a question.
Sure. All I know about the guy I read in your post.
>
> 2) What's POS stand for in the below?
Part Of Speech.

>
> 3) Is there a cross-linguistically complete(ish) table of all
> (or most) correlatives in all (or most) natlangs anywhere?
Not that I know of.
>
> 4) How about this for a pair of subgenders of Human?
> a) people who use "gender" for "sex"
> b) people who carefully distinguish "gender" from "sex".
> ("There are two kinds of people in the world; on the one hand people
> who are constantly thinking there are two kinds of people in the
> world, and on the other hand everyone else.")
>
> 5) Anna Siewierska (in "Person") says (in effect) culturally-
> significant and favorite animals are "honorary" people, in
> Human/Nonhuman gender systems. ISTR Corbett's "Gender" said
> something similar (iirc).
Sure. Personification. In my dialect it's used a lot.

>
> 6) I'd have to look up about Fijian. The Fijians seem to find it
> useful and not a PITA.
> To some degree, how useful and how much of a PITA a certain feature
> of a language is, is best judged by a consensus of (many) L2-speakers.
Exactly.

>
> As an example, Swahili, which is a Bantu language, is not tonal,
> though most Bantu languages are tonal; and Swahili has notably
> fewer "genders" (noun-classes is what Africanists call them) than
> other Bantu languages, especially for plurals; it especially has
> fewer "open" (or productive?) noun-classes than other Bantu languages.
>
> These simplifications are due to Swahili's wide-spread use as an L2
> among L1-speakers of other Bantu languages; in fact, there are many
> more L2-Swahili speakers than L1-Swahili speakers; Swahili is a
> rather minor L1-language compared to other Bantu L1-languages. Yet,
> these simplifications, even those that amount to dropping certain
> Bantu features, come from people who L1-speak Bantu languages.
>
> 7) Thanks for writing. I enjoyed reading this.
> I plan to read up some more on Texperanto and its world, too.
>
And do feel free to make suggestions. The criteria are that
Texperanto is what Z would have invented, had he immigrated to the
Republic of Texas and had become rather more acquainted with English,
Spanish, and Haitian. And other features of the current language,
like letter-anaphora, are considered to be later developments in the
language. I want it to end up being THE perfect reform of Eo.

-rx


On page 281 of "Person" Anna Siewierska says "For instance, whereas Standard
Fijian has over 130 person forms, Plantation pidgin Fijian employs only 6."
(She uses "person forms" instead of "pronouns".)

Page 281 is the very last page of text-body before the appendices, references, and indices.
It is in section 7.3.2 "Loss of Person Agreement" of subchapter 7.3
"Language-Externally Driven Changes in Person Marking" of chapter 7 "Person
Forms in a Diachronic Perspective".

For the above quote, she refers to Chapter 10 of the 1990 work "Pronouns and
People: the Linguistic Construction of Social and Personal Identity" by Peter
Muhlhausler and Rom Harre, and to pages 388-389 of the 2000 work "Classifiers"
by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald from the Oxford Studies in Typology and Linguistic
Theory.

Do you think the list-as-a-group might like to hear of this?

Rex May <rmay@...> wrote:


On Aug 18, 2005, at 4:27 PM, tomhchappell wrote:

[snnip]

> 6) I'd have to look up about Fijian. The Fijians seem to find it
> useful and not a PITA.
> To some degree, how useful and how much of a PITA a certain feature
> of a language is, is best judged by a consensus of (many) L2-speakers.
Exactly.

>
> As an example, Swahili, which is a Bantu language, is not tonal,
> though most Bantu languages are tonal; and Swahili has notably
> fewer "genders" (noun-classes is what Africanists call them) than
> other Bantu languages, especially for plurals; it especially has
> fewer "open" (or productive?) noun-classes than other Bantu languages.
>
> These simplifications are due to Swahili's wide-spread use as an L2
> among L1-speakers of other Bantu languages; in fact, there are many
> more L2-Swahili speakers than L1-Swahili speakers; Swahili is a
> rather minor L1-language compared to other Bantu L1-languages. Yet,
> these simplifications, even those that amount to dropping certain
> Bantu features, come from people who L1-speak Bantu languages.
>[snip]



On Aug 24, 2005, at 4:15 PM, Tom Chappell wrote:

> On page 281 of "Person" Anna Siewierska says "For instance, whereas
> Standard Fijian has over 130 person forms, Plantation pidgin Fijian
> employs only 6."  (She uses "person forms" instead of "pronouns".)
>
> Page 281 is the very last page of text-body before the appendices,
> references, and indices.
> It is in section 7.3.2 "Loss of Person Agreement" of subchapter 7.3
> "Language-Externally Driven Changes in Person Marking" of chapter 7
> "Person Forms in a Diachronic Perspective".
>
> For the above quote, she refers to Chapter 10 of the 1990 work
> "Pronouns and People: the Linguistic Construction of Social and
> Personal Identity" by Peter Muhlhausler and Rom Harre, and to pages
> 388-389 of the 2000 work "Classifiers" by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
> from the Oxford Studies in Typology and Linguistic Theory.
> Do you think the list-as-a-group might like to hear of this?
>
Sure!  Don't be shy.  In re pronouns and the whole bit.  I think that
a conlang intended as an auxlang should strive for _optionality_.
That is, you should be _able_ to make distinctions, but not be
required to.  In Texperanto,

La dogo venis.  (the dog came)

And to refer back to the dog, you can use letter anaphora "d," or lo,
or lu if you're thinking of him as a person, or er or in depending.

And that applies to the first sentence, which can be reduced to 'dog
ven,' if you like.

Rex May
rmay@mac.com





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