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how are you using "vi" in english ...

de jeckle, 2009-majo-13

Mesaĝoj: 35

Lingvo: English

vejktoro (Montri la profilon) 2009-majo-17 04:44:01

ceigered:I wonder if in a language you could easily communicate by scrapping all plural forms of prounouns, e.g. 'I' referring to yourself or everyone?

Because some people say 'we' referring to just themselves in rare cases and it still makes sense (although it's hard not to go 'no, just you' and smile).
Mmm.. can't wait to experiment on this concept ridego.gif
Hmmm.. funny, In my part of the world we often use 'us' as the 1st person singular accusitive. As in, "Give us a beer, please."

But, as I've posted before, we always use 'ye' for plural and 'you', 'ya' or even (although very rare these days) 'de' for singular. It is merely a number distinction... no formal/familiar silliness so it IS useful, and I do miss it in Esperanto.

ceigered (Montri la profilon) 2009-majo-17 06:12:18

yeah that's what I was thinking Rogir, there must be a few out there. And I forgot bout Toki Pona jchthys, but Toki Pona is deliberately ambiguous like that anyway ridulo.gif

And yeah vekjtoro, that's what I had in mind, the whole using 'we/us' instead of 'I/Me'... It seems as if there is a slight colloquial distinction made where:

-"we" or "us" means the person speaking and whoever he represents, which may/may not include others
yet
- "I" or "me" refers to just the person speaking with no others.

And we are already using 'they' / 'them' as a genderless 3rd person singular pronoun, maybe this could be the start of a gradual shift to using "we" "you" and "they" as the standard pronouns with "we all", "you all" and "they all" (or similar variants, I'm sure I've heard 'wese' akin to 'youse', and 'theyse' in some hip hop) being used to distinguish plurality and "I" "thou" and "he/she" being used to distinguish singularity or an implied sense of formality?

vejktoro (Montri la profilon) 2009-majo-17 21:32:05

Here in Newfoundland we even have what linguists are calling the fourth person masculine and feminine: 'buddy' and 'missus'

It's a little further away then the third person, as in "He saw buddy."

Does anyone else have this?

I guess the standard would maybe use, 'that guy' or 'one', or the 'they' you speak of?

Frankouche (Montri la profilon) 2009-majo-17 22:11:33

vejktoro:...so it IS useful, and I do miss it in Esperanto.
Exactly !
I soon said it several times on lernu's forum : distinction between 1 and several persons !

Of course politness intentions, respect... can occur but it is totally different when you say that you speak to 1 person or to several persons. This lacks to esperanto even if the "good soldiers of the fundamento" always say that it doesn't...

ceigered (Montri la profilon) 2009-majo-18 17:26:39

Speaking of pronouns and persons, here's some links to Wikipedia articles regarding this topic in case any of you are curious but too lazy to go and look for yourself ridulo.gif

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fourth_person
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_person
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronouns

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_pronouns
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_morphology#Pron...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonian_pronouns
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_p...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_pronouns
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_language#P...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pronouns
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_pronouns
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_pronouns

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_grammar#Pro...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ido#Pronouns

I've more or less divied it up into language or culture groups. Personally I find the East Asian way of dealing with pronouns and the original PIE pronouns interesting due mostly due to the fact that there seems to be some form of system going on 90% of the time, moderately similar to Esperanto's way of adding -n and -e

vejktoro (Montri la profilon) 2009-majo-19 01:39:32

ceigered,

I looked at a few, thanks for doing the work for us.

As I read I found this sentence:
The term fifth person is sometimes used in archaic language to refer to a category of foreign bodies not indicated in other forms of alienable linguistics.
Ha!... er... what?!?
Boy that really cleared things up. Say that in Esperanto, somebody.

While were on the topic, check this out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tok_Pisin#Grammar

ceigered (Montri la profilon) 2009-majo-19 11:25:54

Cheers for that link Vejktoro, I found it interesting how pronouns had been approached in Tok Pisin. It seems as if there is a general tendency early on in the birth of a language for pronouns to act more like nouns in construction and then evolve into distinct and unique forms later on, e.g. like in English or French. It's quite interesting how pronouns are used in languages though, I wonder how long it took for pronouns to evolve when languages were first being used (unless you take the approach that God/Some other supernatural being gave language to humans and all language derived from that one, in which case I would like to find out the divine rationale for such an interesting concept like pronouns).

Rogir (Montri la profilon) 2009-majo-19 15:11:27

I think that the capability of language in humans was evolved, not invented. So it will be hard if not impossible to speak of a first language, and unfortunately brains are seldom conserved in fossils.

ceigered (Montri la profilon) 2009-majo-20 10:55:02

Rogir:unfortunately brains are seldom conserved in fossils.
Mine couldn't be fossilised anyway - I lost it long ago ploro.gif

Miland (Montri la profilon) 2009-majo-20 13:12:40

ceigered:
Rogir:unfortunately brains are seldom conserved in fossils.
Mine couldn't be fossilised anyway - I lost it long ago ploro.gif
You can manage without a brain? Excellent! Just the sort of supporter our political party is looking for .. rido.gif

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