Re: Mixed person plurals

Hello, John.
--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, John Vertical <johnvertical@H...>
> wrote:
> [snip]
> Also, the Speedtalk thread has given me the idea of
> "ordered variables"; in
> a large crowd, instead of proper names,
> ordinal affixes could be added to
> pronouns in order to refer to 3rd person #2,
> not 3rd person #1 or #33. How
> the numbers would initially be defined seems
> still a little hazy, tho. If it
> were simply in the order in which
> each person was first mentioned (you start
> from 3rd#1, the next 3rd person you'll need
> to refer to is #2 etc.) the
> discussion would not be understandable by
> someone who had not followed it
> since the beginning.
> Wait, scratch that - using the names *themselves*
> as the affixes would
> actually be a lot more efficient.
> Or, since names tend to not inflect much,
> and can be quite long, maybe such a case would be better
> analyzed/constructed as affix versions of personal pronouns
> (more on which
> below) added to the names.
>
> I pulled the last paragraph straight out of my head,
> but I'm almost sure
> there's a natlang somewhere which does just that...
About your "ordinal affixes" idea;
Here is a quote from
http://www.geocities.com/ceqli/Texperanto.html
where a similar goal is accomplished;

The names of the letters are: af, bet, ce, del, ep, foy, gam, hac,
ic, jey, kap, lam, mim, nan, om, pi, qa, ro, sig, taw, up, vay, waw,
xin, yot, zed
They are used as names of letters, of course, and (since a trend
began in the late 20th century) they are also used as anaphora, i. e.
as pronouns that refer back to the last word that begins with that
particular letter. Example: Me donis karno ad la leono. Lam manjis
kap. (usually just written as "L manjis k.")

Of course, Texperanto is not a natlang, but...

> [snip]
> I also think "mixed singulars" could perhaps imply
> 2 persons, and "mixed
> dual" 3 ("me and two others"). Does this make any sense??
There appear to be languages where "I and thou" is singular, "I and
you two" is dual, and "I and you three" is trial or paucal.
In other words, the "Inclusive" person (where both the speaker and
(one or more) addressee(s) are meant) takes its grammatical "number"
from how many addressees are included, not from how many people are
meant in total.
So, yes, I think what you propose makes sense; it's a more-or-less
obvious-in-retrospect generalization of something which actually
happens in natlangs.  (AFAIK, though, nobody ever thought of
generalizing it before, and your idea is something that doesn't
happen in a natlang.  I'd be pleased if some other contributor could
show examples that relieved my ignorance, if such it is, in this
matter.)

> [snip]
> So how do *you* differentiate 3rd and 4th persons? I agree that
that's what
> causes most of the confusion here, but I'm using the 4th person
*also* as a
> (conrete) relative pronoun ("it" - I don't know what's the
technical name
> here), which widens the semantic difference.
What do you mean by "4th person", exactly?

Sometimes "4th person" means "obviative"; like, "the 3rd person who
is further away, as opposed to the 3rd person who is closer."
Sometimes "4th person" means "the latter", where "3rd person"
means "the former".
Sometimes "4th person" means "a 3rd person (in a subordinate clause)
who was a participant in the superordinate main clause."
And since I'm no expert, I'll bet there are others, because AFAIK
there could be.
Which one do you mean?

-----

Thanks for writing,

Tom H.C. in MI

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