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Re: Fourth Person

From:Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
Date:Wednesday, October 7, 1998, 6:12
Nik Taylor wrote:

> But the fact is that the term "fourth person" is already well-established as > a synonym to "obviate". You can't go around changing the meanings of > well-established terms willy-nilly. If you don't want to call it a "generic/indefinite > third-person pronoun", call it something else, but *not* "fourth person". I can't > think of anything other than "third-person indefinite" to call it, tho. It *is* a sort > of "indefinite gender", corresponding to he, she and it for masculine, feminine > and neuter.
But if you note that the term "fourth person" in reference to an proximate/ obviate system such as that which characterizes many Native American languages is in fact not only limited to those languages, but its use there is even on the wain because of the misleading name it has. So, to try to use the term "fourth person" in the sense that I was claiming was more like coining the term than reassigning it some other semantic meaning. Besides, we already have two specific terms to refer to the two specific aspects of the third person systems of those languages which have it, "proximate" and "obviate", so if anything, the fourth person term used in that sense is the one, I think, that should not be used. As for the meaning of "one", I have already stated that saying "one" is a generic pronoun is a little misleading in itself, as it says really nothing about the pronoun. As I said, the problem with the way Aristotle explained the reason why rocks fall to the ground ("because they have a tendency to do so") is that it's not very enlightening. Similarly, if you say that the "one" is a just a generic pronound 'because it is', that's not telling you much. That's why I like to look at the genericness of "one" as a dimensional thing. Clearly, "one" is not likely the other pronouns that in English receive the third person ending -s; it is dimensionally beyond that, because it applies to those beings in their being a member of something beyond the scope of the people known -- when you say "one", you are saying what a member of society _would_ say, what he _would_ do, and so forth. You are taking a step beyond just merely a "third" person, experiences, you are talking about what society as a whole would say or feel. And in this, don't think that it's a delusion of plurality, because "one" can be both -- you can think of society as a collective, or society as a gathering of individuals. "One" could be pluralized, too, if we had the means in English. So, in a sense, you have to think about what the "fourth person" would have to look like. It would have to be as dimensionally different, in my opinion, as the third dimension (space) is from the fourth (time). ======================================================= Tom Wier <artabanos@...> ICQ#: 4315704 AIM: Deuterotom Website: <http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/> "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero." "Why should men quarrel here, where all possess / as much as they can hope for by success?" - Quivera, _The Indian Queen_ by Henry Purcell ========================================================