Re: 2nd person inanimate (WAS: Numbers from 1 to 12 in Ayeri)

Sally Caves wrote:

> I love the idea!  But what use would it serve?  A compelling human tendency
> is to animate everything.   "The tree likes to be watered every other day."
> In addressing the letter you're writing, you would be treating it as a
> hearing thing.   I suppose it would make sense in a language that has
> animate/inanimate gender instead of masculine/feminine gender.  Curious:
> what natural languages genderize the second person?  You feminine singular
> as opposed to you masculine singular?
I don't know what natlangs do this, but my orelynna does distinguish
masc. & fem. human 2nd person (and 1st) singular. (It also has an
animate/inanimate classification for 3rd person. I also have not decided
how to treat speaking to an inanimate object as 2nd person. But
anyway...) Each of the noun cases has its own pronomial form:

SINGULAR
        YOU (masc)  YOU (fem)
NOM.       do         ka
ACC.       duo        kua
DAT.       deo        kea
GEN.       -dsa       -ksa
EQU.       dova       kava
COM.       doky*      kaky
ABE.       domo       kamo

* strange trivia: The first person masc. form of the comitative case is
oky. So 'with me, with you' would be: 'oky, doky'. Bizarre.


--
=============
James Worlton
          "We know by means of our intelligence
          that what the intelligence does not
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                           --Simone Weil