Re: "Register" a grammatical term

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 5:16 AM, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:

> Jim Henry wrote:
> [snip]
>> .......  It was in a context, I think, where
>> he was arguing against revival of the obsolete-almost-as-soon-as-
>> the-language-was-born intimate pronoun "ci".
>
> It came across it in a book I came across in 1949 or thereabouts. I have no
> idea whether any Esperantists still used it or not. But in text books it
> seems to lived on for some time, if not in actual use.
I wasn't around in 1949, but my impression is that it had long since
dropped out of actual use by then.  I think current introductory textbooks
tend to not mention it at all, or say it's occasionally (rarely) used
in poetry.   (Piron argues against its use in poetry on more or less
wordsworthian grounds, as against other literary words that aren't used
in everyday spoken Esperanto.)


>> (He argues, IIRC,
>> that Zamenhof put the intimate pronoun in to satisfy certain speakers
>> of languages with formal/informal pronouns who would complain
>> if it were absent, but deliberately gave it an unpleasant sound
>> so no one would actually us it for very long.)
>
> What's unpleasant about _ci_ [tsi]? To me it sounds no more or less
> unpleasant than _vi_ or any of the other personal pronouns.
Piron's lamatyave, I reckon.  /t_s/ sounds to me a bit less
pleasant than some other affricates, but not as unpleasant
as a lot of other phonemes.   A quick look at the words
starting with |c| /t_s/ in my gzb dictionary reveals no strong
phonaesthetic commonality among them.

I can't quote Piron exactly because I loaned the book
out some years ago and never got it back.  So it's possible
I'm misremembering exactly what he said.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/fluency-survey.html
Conlang fluency survey -- there's still time to participate before
I analyze the results and write the article

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