Re: THEORY: language and philosophy [was Re: A question andintroduction]

On Sun, 16 Jun 2002, Nik Taylor wrote:

> A friend of mine whose conworld contains several sentient species, one
> of her conlangs uses different sets of pronouns for each sentient
> species, so that, for example, there's "I (elf)" "I (human)" "I
> (dwarf)", etc., in all 3 persons.  I wonder just how realistic that
> would be.  Some languages do have distinct 1st and/or 2nd person
> pronouns by gender, but I know of none that distinguish race.  The elven
> pronouns are used as the generic pronouns.
I little bit of hear-say on this point. A friend of mine who worked on
languages of Australia once told me that he knew of a language that had a
system very like gender that was based on tribe/clan affiliation. I don't
know any more about it than that it was an Australian language, and I have
never tried to confirm this.

At first I was quite shocked by the idea, but the more I thought about it,
the less far-fetched it seemed. I can imagine this kind of situation
arising through the usual processes that have been proposed for the
origins of gender. The things start as full nouns, become necessary for
counting or descriptive statements ('7 Zulu men came', 'the angry Wagaman
shaman raised his staff', etc) ending up looking like a classifier system.
The nouns gets phonologically reduced (as high frequency elements tend
to), and end up being treated as bound morphemes.

I suppose this story could get retold plausiblly to get first person
pronouns distinguished for tribe/race. You'd just have to take a more
Japanese-like approach to pronominalization.

Marcus