Re: Animacy in active languages (was Re: Non-static verbs?)

On Sat, 19 Aug 2000 00:07:04 -0400 Padraic Brown
<pbrown@...> writes:
> >Steg Belsky wrote:
> > Hmm...a few years ago my brother and a friend invented
> > "second-and-a-half" pronouns - how you refer to someone who's
> standing
> > right there while you're talking to someone else.  Does anyone
> have a
> > conlang that makes use of those?
> Not as such. A Talarian speaker could make a similar distinction
> by affixing one of those oh-so-usefull demonstrative pronouns.
> Such a person could be referred to as tu-cos, "this-here thou".
> More likely, the 2nd & 1/2 person would be referred to by name,
> which is a little more polite. Definitely more polite than using
> plain 3rd person cos (he/she), thus pretending that the other fellow
> isn't there at all!
> Padraic.
-

That's pretty much sort of what a Rokbeigalmki speaker would do, by
attaching _e-_ (from _ez_ "thou") to the front of a third-person pronoun:
 _e-oz_ [?E?oz].  It's the same kind of grammatical highjacking that is
involved when sketching up impromptu inclusive and exclusive "we"s or
immediate and general "here/there/etc."s from the *tense* affixes _a_
(present-immediate) and _oi_ (present-routine):
A-AMZ = "immediate us", exclusive we
OI-AMZ = "general us", inclusive we


-Stephen (Steg)