WHAT vs. WHO

[Michael Noonan]

One thing you might consider in thinking about this problem is that many
languages show a common root in forms for 'who' and 'what', e.g. IE *kw-,
Western Nilotic *ng-, Kannada yaa-, etc.  This implies that who/what forms
derive from something like 'what person' and 'what thing'.  And while
this, in itself, doesn't necessarily imply a stage where there were no
dedicated 'who' and 'what' forms, it makes the existence of such a stage
at least plausible.

Mickey Noonan

Michael Noonan                  Professor of Linguistics
Dept. of English                Office:   414-229-4539
University of Wisconsin         Fax:      414-229-2643
Milwaukee, WI  53201            Messages: 414-229-4511
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On Thu, 6 Mar 2003, [iso-8859-1] Björn Wiemer wrote:

> Hello to everybody,
> can anybody help me with the following issue?
>          Do you know of languages, either contemporary ones or in earlier
> times, which do not distinguish between person and thing (animate vs.
> inanimate) in their pronouns? E.g., English has WHO vs. WHAT (+ all
> pronouns derived from these stems: WHATSOEVER, WHOEVER etc.), German JEMAND
> vs. ETWAS (+ IRGENDJEMAND, IRGENDETWAS etc.), Polish KTO vs. CO (+ all
> indefinite pronouns derived from these) and so on. Baltic, however, has
> only KAS (+ KAZ^KAS, KAI KAS etc.). As far as I know, this is a
> common-Baltic innovation with regard to earlier I.E. dialects. I wonder
> whether this feature is unique and what are its motives (since the
> distinction between person and thing seems to be very basic; Wierzbicka,
> for instance, considers it to belong to her Semantic Primitives).
>          I have searched for cross-linguistic information in books like
> Majtinskaja's work on pronoun systems and the Universals Archive at
> Constance University -- in vain. Does anybody know of overviews on pronoun
> systems paying attention to this semantic distinction?
>          Any hints are very welcome.
> 
> With best regards,
> Bjoern Wiemer.
> 
> 
> 
> PD Dr. Bjoern Wiemer
> Universitaet Konstanz
> FB Sprachwissenschaft / Slavistik
> Postfach 55 60, D 179
> D- 78457 Konstanz
> 
> tel.: ++49 / 7531 / 88 -2582
> fax: ++49 / 7531 / 88 -4007
> e-mail: Bjoern.Wiemer at uni-konstanz.de
> http://www.uni-konstanz.de/FuF/Philo/Sprachwiss/slavistik/wiemer/index.htm
>