Re: Nauradi

On Mon, 24 Nov 2008 12:07:32 -0500, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...> wrote:

>As an engelang, gzb has this kind of optional pronoun marking.  I think
>in my early use of the language,  I probably leaned on sex-marked
>pronouns more than I do now.  A look at my last frequency analysis
>of my corpus, which is weighted toward recent texts, and a bit of
>possibly unreliable introspection suggests that I tend to use bare
>unmarked pronouns more often these days, and when marking
>pronouns with some kind of qualifier for disambiguation, suggests
>that I'm more likely to mark them for age, humanness, number,
>or attitude than for sex.  (There are about as many situations
>where I talk about two persons of the same sex but different ages,
>or toward whom I feel differently, as there are situations where
>I talk about two people of different sexes; and practice shows that
>in many cases context will make the pronoun referents clear
>even without qualifiers.)
Quite interesting.

How is this marking implemented?  I remember gzb having a slim 3p pronoun
inventory: on checking the grammar, just _pq, te_ and their cataphoric
alternants _mq, nxe_ plus others which probably don't come in here.  Are the
marked variants some form of compound?

Would you characterise your current pattern of pronoun usage as more in the
gzb spirit than the former pattern?

Alex

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