Re: Mixed person plurals
| From: | Patrick Littell <puchitao@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Wednesday, July 6, 2005, 21:51 |
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I was playing around with the same notion for a little language for one of
the Aohutlian races (the ones that evolved on a treeless planet and thus
lack tree-structured grammars ;). The Pombba, whose language is entirely
rhythmic, use this sort of scheme; there are four persons and plurals
thereof are simply combinations.
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. Many of the combinations are motivated in this way; presumably
there was once a richer and more regular system but drift, rhythmic
constraints, and collision-avoidance turned it into a system that mostly
makes sense but has a few synchronically-unexplainable combinations.
Somewhere I have a draft saved; I'll post it soon.
On 7/4/05, John Vertical <johnvertical@...> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I've been thinking about the plurals of personal (and relative) pronouns
> lately...
> For background information, my conlang has 4 different persons. I think
> the
> exact difference between 3rd and 4th persons varies between languages -
> I'm
> using the 3rd for people who are in the discussion but who are not the
> recipient of the message, and 4th for any extrenal beings, regardless of
> their sentience.
>
> So, now I'm faced with the problem of mixed person plurals. It seems to me
> that NONE of the generic plurals are pure; eg the generic "2nd person
> plural" may well include also people who would be 3rd or 4th person, if
> individually referred to.
> I could go for a very finely distinctive system, by using different words
> for ALL the plural types - 13 different ones are possible: 1+2, 1+3, 1+4,
> 1+2+3, 1+2+4, 1+3+4, 1+2+3+4, 2, 2+3, 2+4, 2+3+4, 3, 3+4, 4 - but a system
> this wide does not seem sensible. However, with regards to this, I do want
> to distinguish more than just the generic three or four.
>
> The same problem applies to relative pronouns. I'm not sure of the
> terminology used for their classification, but it seems to me that the
> singular ones in eg. English correspond roughly with my 2nd, 3rd and 4th
> persons. I have two rel. pron. sets, one for abstracts and one for
> concrete
> objects (with the 4th concrete merged with the 4th person), and the 7
> later
> classes of plurals are again possible in both series here.
> Not to mention plurals mixing pronouns from different series altogether
> (like 1st person with 4th abstract), but those seem generally a little too
> unuseful. A few variants of "all" and a few variants of "person +
> possessions" should be enough for those.
>
> The question is: what plural types do you think would be the most likely
> to
> merge? I'm fairly sure that at least the 1+2+4 type is of too little use
> to
> warrant a word on its own. Some types might exist only for certain numbers
> (obviously the mixed plurals can have no singular, and eg 1+2 might only
> have a dual) ... other restrictions might be possible too.
> Oh, and any ANADEWism changes here? What's the most different personal
> pronouns (disregarding gender) distinguished in a natlang?
>
> John Vertical
>
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