Re: THEORY: irregular conlangs

Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>         Some natlangs are very regular in fact. Japanese for instance has a
> handful of irregular verbs and that's all. Even the Japanese possessive
> pronouns are formed regularly taking the personal pronouns and suffixing
> them with 'no': "of" like other nouns.
Not surprising, since historically they WERE nouns, used as polite
"euphemisms", to avoid having to use the pronoun (much as, IIRC, one
still would usually say "Sensei's book" rather than "your book" when
talking to one's sensei), and gradually lost their politeness (boku, for
instance, originally meant "servant", but now can only be used in
informal settings with equals!)

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