Re: Mixed person plurals

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, # 1 wrote:
>Personnaly, to reduce the number I'd not keep the distinction between 3rd
>and 4th person when there are 1st and 2nd person implied.
I somewhat agree; but I can still imagine situations (such as a meeting
where each participant is a representative of a different faction) where
even finer distinctions were required... 1+2+3+4 versus 1+2+4 would be quite
obvious in this context.
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...


>you may create all the 13 pronouns but agglutinatively
<sneep>

That's something I considered, too. I'm marking number with separate
auxiliaries/clitics (a generalization from the logical quantor operators
"for all" and "there exists" - I'll probably post more on that system some
other day), which would simplify the selection.
Anyway, given that some of the distinctions seem rarer than others, I'm
starting to lean towards a system where generic pronouns could be used most
of the time, and form finer distinctions like 2.PL vs. 2+3 by affixes:
probably by ones derived from the generic pronouns, and with my already
existing "affix of explicite indefinity". It would take some paperwork to
find out the best selections for each base mixed person pronoun, in order to
avoid having some particular fine-distinction pronoun derivable via two
different routes. If I end up at any interesting results, I'll post 'em
here...

I also think "mixed singulars" could perhaps imply 2 persons, and "mixed
dual" 3 ("me and two others"). Does this make any sense??


--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Patrick Littell wrote:
>Most of the combinations are pretty obvious; the only tricky part is what
>to do about the 3rd and 4th persons. In general, the choice of 3rd or 4th
>for, say, 1st exclusive dual is arbitrary and simply has to be learnt by
>rote. It happens that 1st exc. dual is a combination of 1st and 3rd,
>because due to rhythmic constraints a combination of 1st and 4th would
>collide with the 1st singular.
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.

John Vertical

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