Re: Animacy of nouns

On Sat, 10 Sep 2005 07:48:05 -0600, Dirk Elzinga <dirk.elzinga@...>
wrote:
>
>On 9/10/05, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:
>> Carsten wrote:
>> <<
>> My question is how do you know how animate a
>> noun is compared to another one? Are there rules (maybe only
>> rules of thumb), or is this completely up to the speaker, or
>> are there groups of "objects with high animateness",
>> "objects with an average animacy", "objects with a low
>> animacy", "inanimate objects", i.e. some kind of noun
>> classes for this?
>>  >>
>>
>> First, this is language-specific.  So, for example, first person
>> tends to be more animate than second person, but there's a
>> rather famous native American language (I just can't remember
>> the name) where second person is more animate than first.
>
>I believe it is a Yuman language (Maricopa, Yavapai, Walapai, Mojave,
>etc). I liked this feature, so I included it in Miapimoquitch.
also Central Algonquian (e.g. Ojibwe/Potawatomi/Ottawa) if I've understood
correctly, maybe all Algonquian, gives precedence to 2nd person, then 1st
person, wrt verb agreement. Main verbs use a combination of prefixes and
suffixes. If a 2nd person is involved, it gets the prefix, etc. Also, it's
2nd person that has inclusive forms rather than 1st person.

I've been considering giving 2nd person priority in my Noimi project, but
probably not that system. And of course, the _first_ place I saw 2nd person
> 1st person was in Miapimoquitch.
Jeff

>
>Dirk
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