Re: "Register" a grammatical term

Eldin Raigmore skrev:
 > Many people often get "formal" and "honorific"
 > confused with each other, and get "informal" and
 > "familiar" confused with each other, at least at
 > first; especially if their native languages
 > don't make such a distinction.
 >
 > But they do differ.

I am aware of all this. The problem I have is a
very practical one: under one interpretation of
one of the many sketches of the Quenya pronominal
system which Tolkien left behind the pronouns make
the following distinctions, cutting across the
three numbers singular, plural and dual:

| Person
| 1.    inclusive      'we and you'
| 1.    exclusive      'we but not you'
| 2.    familiar       'thou, you'
| 2.    polite         'sir(s), ma'am'
| 2.    reverent       'My Lord(s)/Lady(-ies)'
|                       (when talking to him/her/them)
| 3.    animate        's/he'
| 3.    reverent       'my lord(s)/lady(-ies)'
|                       (when talking about them)
| 3.    inanimate      'it'
| 3.    impersonal      '(it)'
|       reflexive      '-self'

While it may not be wholly seriously-linguistically-
theoretically justify to subsume all the
distinctions in column two under a single heading
I think it might be justified to do so in a
description aimed at those who want to acquire a
command of the language and are not linguistically-
theoretically inclined. For such an audience it
seems to be a Good Thing to be able to present the
pronouns in a table like the one above, with
additional columns to the right containing the
actual forms in the three numbers, and not to
proliferate the number of named grammatical
categories. "Register" is the best I can come up
with. Another possibility might be "attitude",
even though not all of the distinctions in
question involve the speaker's attitude towards
the subject and/or addressee, but "register" seems
to be more value-neutral.

/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch atte melroch dotte se
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