Re: Fourth person was Re: CONLANG Digest

Peter Clark wrote:
>         My terminology is a little rusty, but I would say that the words
> you are looking for is "fourth person".
That's one term for it.  It's also called "proximate" and "obviate"

> On  skazal jemu    pravdu o     jego matjeri.
> He1 told   to+him2 truth  about his2 mother.
>
> On  skazal jemu    pravdu o     svojej matjeri.
> He1 told   to+him2 truth  about his1   mother.
Latin did that, too.  But, the modern descendants (or at least some)
have lost that distinction.  In Latin, _sui_ meant "of the subject",
_sibi_ "to the subject", and so on, while _is_, etc. meant "he", etc.
I'm not sure if _sui_, etc. were used other than to disambiguate, but
the accusative form _se_ has given the modern Romance languages their
reflexive pronoun, and the genetive _sui_ is the source of forms like
Sp. _su_

Watakassí does it rather interestingly.  Modifiers must agree with what
they modify in case, for instance:

Fa-vulík-u pi-saní-s   na-Ján-f-as
Past-go-I  G7-home-ALL G2-John-GEN-ALL
I went to John's house

Pronouns may also agree in case with what they refer back to (mostly
only used in situations of ambiguity), for instance:

Fasagátas (naka) nísnaz wawailá tinanímadu nísnaf[al/az]
Fa-sagá-tas      naka   n-ísna-z    wa-wailá ti-naní-ma-du
n-ísna-f-al/az
Past-tell-he/she he.nom G2-pron-DAT G6-truth G2-mother-his-ELL
G2-pron-GEN-ERG/DAT

The suffix -ma on "mother" is required, since she's "possessed", so to
speak.  If the final word is nísnafal, then "he" can only refer back to
_naka_ (which is not required in the sentence anyways), and if it's
nísnafaz, then it can only refer back to _nísnaz_.

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