Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Plural pronouns

After years and years of deliberation, we've finally got the singular pronoun system in the bag:

I = ni
you = se
he/she/it = li

Well, okay, there is the fact that "I" and "he" would be homophonous for many Cantonese speakers, and just that teeny glimmer of uncertainty about se, and whether it might be better if it were te so that sentences like the following wouldn't be such tongue-twisters:

Ei se sa si sano li tia?
Q 2SG TOPIC PERF=say 3SG that
"Was it you who told him that?"

I think this would be slightly less ridiculous as Ei te sa si sano li tia? But the thing is that I really like "you" as se, damn it all! I've been struggling with this sodding issue for years and years, and it always comes back to the same thing.

Say, what if the topicalizer were something like ta instead of sa? So Ei se ta si sano li tia? That's actually even better. I might have less allegiance to sa as TOPIC than to se as "you," though my heart weeps at the thought nonetheless. Something to think about.

ANYWAY, this isn't what I was intending to talk about. The thing is, aside from nu as "we" that I've always felt ambivalent about, we have no plural pronouns. I see five possible approaches here:

1) No plural pronouns. Nouns don't have plurals in Koa, so why should pronouns?
2) Completely different forms for singular and plural pronouns (like ni and nu -- I could also have li and lu in parallel).
3) Plurals formed by reduplicating the singular: nini, sese, lili. Note that we could not then use reduplication pragmatically as we had previously been throwing around.
4) Plurals formed by adding a morpheme, like Mandarin , nǐ, tā "I, you, he" and wǒmen, nǐmen, tāmen "we, y'all, they." This morpheme could either never show up elsewhere in the grammar, or be used for certain other specified purposes as in Mandarin.
5) Some kind of hodgepodge of systems: combinations of the above, or maybe a separate morpheme for "we," since that's semantically different from the plural of "I," but then "y'all" could be either seni (typologically consistent with creoles) or just se as in English, and I suppose we don't absolutely need a 3PL pronoun. Or hey, how about pose = "all of you," poli = "all of them?" (po)nu, seni/pose, poli? Hm.

As always, I just don't know where to go with this. Aside from #1 which I don't think I'll really be considering, all of these seem possible and none of them strike me any more overwhelmingly positively than any others. Mimblewimble.

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