Re: Verbal Inflection for Formality

>>Well, I would too, because I don't know much about them.  I don't know much
>>about them because I don't like them.  I want to know what the typological
>>correlates of honorifics are so I can avoid those features in my conlangs
>>and not make it so obvious I was trying to avoid honorifics.
>>
>>
Really? I ask because I'm working on a collaborative conworld with a few
other people from the ZBB at the moment which is set in the Bronze Age,
around the time period the first major city states arose on Earth. Well,
it seems to me that most of the early city states were quite highly
stratified or separated into various castes, so I thought that somewhat
complex structures for marking formality and politeness, including
verbal inflection, lots of choices of pronouns, suppletive polite forms
of certain nouns, etc might fit in well as a language for a city.

>BTW there are languages where part of the honorific system is in the
> voice;
> an honorific referent can't ever be a non-subject participant of a clause
> which has a non-honorific subject.  So if a lot is happening or has
> happened or is going to happen to a prince, and you're telling someone
> about it, you use the passive voice a _lot_.
I wonder how they deal with oblique mentions? E.g. "I ate with the
prince"... I guess you could try to rephrase it, e.g "the prince and I
ate", but IIRC when talking about people of vastly different status
you'd try not to lump them together like that.