Re: This and That (was: Re: Adjectives, Particles, and This...)

Nik Taylor wrote:

> J Matthew Pearson wrote:
> >   ety      aty       in physical contact with speaker
> >   eto      ato       quite close to speaker, but not touching
> >   eo       ao        within the 'immediate domain' of speaker
> >   eny      any       outside the 'immediate domain' of speaker
> >   ery      ary       very far away from speaker
>
> What are the other four?
Let's see... [digs through a bunch of articles]... There's _etsy/atsy_ and
_eroa/aroa_.

The _eroa/aroa_ forms are supposed to be sort of halfway in between _eny/any_ and
_ery/ary_:  They would be used when the object in question is far from the speaker,
but not super far.  However, these forms are almost never used:  In my 6+ years of
working on Malagasy I've never once run across them, either in elicited speech or in
texts.  Presumably they're either obsolete or belong to a non-standard dialect.  The
grad student whose work I cited in the last email reported that the native speaker he
consulted was unsure how to use the _eroa/aroa_ forms.

As for _etsy/atsy_, these forms are sometimes used to contrast the location of one
referent with the nearby location of another referent.  For example, if I were to say
"This book goes *here* [pointing to a space on the shelf] and this other book goes
*here* [pointing to another space on the same shelf]", I might use _eo_ in the first
case and _etsy_ in the second case.  As with _eroa/aroa_, however, these forms are not
especially common.  By contrast, the ten forms I mentioned in the last email are all
in active use.

Matt.