Borrowing of Pronouns

[John Charles Smith]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
In a paper recently published in Oceanic Linguistics (37:1 (1998),
pp. 65-84), Mark Donohue and I reach the following conclusion,
which may be of relevance to Dan Everett's query, although the
borrowing does not involve the whole pronominal system:

"Having shown that we have [in many varieties of Malay]
a loss of the otherwise near-universal (among Austronesian
languages) opposition between inclusive and exclusive
first-person nonsingular pronouns, we can speculate
on the reasons why it happens to be Malay/Indonesian that is the
language so affected. It has long been established that varieties of
Malay are prone to borrow pronouns from other sources; witness
1SG saya (< Sanskrit) in Standard Malay/Indonesian [...],
2SG ose (< Portuguese) in Ambonese Malay, 1SG gua (< Hokkien
(Min) Chinese) in Betawi, 2SG lu  (< Hokkien (Min) Chinese) in
both Betawi and Kupang Malay, and yu (< English) in the formal
speech of educated people in many regions. It is worth noting that
none of these source languages, nor any of the other languages that
have had a strong influence on the linguistic history of
Malay/Indonesian, maintains an inclusive/exclusive distinction in
the nonsingular pronouns. It is speculative, but tempting, to suggest
that we have a case here of a linguistic paradigm (lack of opposition
between inclusive and exclusive forms of the first-person nonsingular
pronoun) being borrowed, without the form itself being transmitted."

John Charles Smith
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