Re: He, she and it against hem
- From: "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 08 Aug 2005 13:05:07 GMT
Neeraj Mathur wrote:
>
> Marc Adler wrote:
> > António Marques wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Does anyone know of
> >>any language which at one time had a similar pronominal distinction,
> >>gender associated to sex, lost it, and lost the pronominal distinction
> >>too?
> >
> >
> > Persian. 'U' for "he" and "she." Don't know what the distinction was
> > originally, though.
> >
> > Marc
>
> Hindi (and some other Modern Indo-Aryan languages) have a converse
> situation where gender exists, but there are no gender distinctions in
> the third person pronouns. Rather, these pronouns are mildly
> demostrative: 'ye' (this) and 'vo' (that).
>
> Sanskrit (and, it seems, Indo-European, given the comparative evidence)
> did not have a specific third person personal pronoun like he, she, etc.
> Rather, it had demostrative pronouns. In Sanskrit, a demostrative could
> theoretically be used with any person. The demostratives were themselves
> divided basically into those which indicate remote things and those
> which indicate what is close at hand. Since the speaker and the
> addressee are usually close at hand, the remote pronouns are rarely (or
> never) used with the first and second person. The close pronouns, on the
> other hand, are:
>
> a) sah praviSati 'that [man] enters'
> b) esah praviSati 'this [man] enters'
> c) esah praviSAmi '[this] I enter'; 'this is me entering', 'here I am as
> I enter', 'see, I enter'
>
> This last is possible even if a personal pronoun is used:
>
> d) esah aham praviSAmi
>
> Thus while 'sa' can often seem to be functioning as a personal pronoun,
> it seems more sensible to consider Sanskrit to have no personal pronouns
> at all for the third person, only demostrative pronouns whose use is
> determined by factors fully independent from person.
>
> This is more or less true of Latin and other earlyish IE languages as
> well, although the ability to use demostrative pronouns with first or
> second person pronouns or verbs is limited (if existent). The cognates
> of Sanskrit 'sa' give the definite articles of many IE languages,
> including Ancient Greek and Old English.
>
> Persian also had demonstratives in the earlier stages in the third
> person, rather than a third person personal pronoun.
>
> So a question perhaps worth asking, alongside that of the disappearance
> of gender distinction in the third person pronoun, is how does a third
> person personal pronoun come to exist in the first place?
Perhaps IE had a perfectly nice set of 3p pronouns, but they happen not
to have survived in more than one daughter branch -- because of "person
inflation," as in German "Sie" 'you' (polite) and "Er" 'you' (demeaning,
known to me from *Woyzeck* and taken into *Wozzeck*).
So a normal substitute for the coopted 3p is the demonstratives.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.
- References:
- He, she and it against hem
- From: António Marques
- Re: He, she and it against hem
- From: Marc Adler
- Re: He, she and it against hem
- From: Neeraj Mathur
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