Pronouns in Euraisa and elsewhere

[Stefan Georg]

Austroasiatic Khasi in Meghalaya (surrounded by Tibeto-Burman  
languages) has a 1st sg pronoun /nga/, which is quite obviously  
borrowed (or "copied", as fashion dictates to say) from Tibeto-Burman  
(read: some TB source, not necessarily proto-TB).

The textbook version of the Sino-Tibetan hypothesis holds, of course,  
that Chinese and TB pronouns are cognate. Recent work on ST (Sagart,  
Beckwith) has, however, presented some highly interesting arguments  
in favour of a prehistoric borrowing scenario, which makes TB *nga a  
borrowing from (some early form of) Chinese - in a nutshell: there  
are philological arguments that /nga/ in Chinese is not the oldest  
form of the 1st p. sg. pronoun, but arouse during the documented  
history of Chinese; on the other hand, the distributional pattern of / 
nga/ within TB points to borrowing in some non-adjacent areas of the  
TB territory, while the original 1st sg pronouns seems to have been  
rather *ka. This is not the communis opinio in ST studies so far, and  
I hasten to add that the ST hypothesis is not over and done with, but  
it is, so to speak, under fire.

So-called "Altaic" languages do share pronouns, and this has been  
widely used as one of the major arguments in favour of the  
genealogical relationship of Turkic, Mongolian and Tungus. The  
alternative view (that "Altaic" is a convergence area, not a  
divergent phylum) explains most (old and good) commonalities between  
Turkic and Mongolian as borrowings in the latter from a subgroup of  
the former, i.e. of Bolghar Turkic. Now, 1st and 2nd singular  
pronouns of Turkic and Mongolian are compatible with this view, as  
the Mongolian pronouns can be interpreted as showing "Bolghar-Turkic"  
traits. Though the debate on "Altaic" goes on, the opinion that these  
pronouns are indubitable signs of a relationship seems to be  
shattered and early pronoun borrowing cannot be ruled out here.

Together with A.P. Volodin, I have, in a different century, lent  
support to (yet another) criticism of a further genealogical  
grouping, viz. Chukchi-Kamchatkan. If we were right, Itelmen would  
have to be counted as another instance of a pronoun-borrowing  
language (since it, of course, shares its pronouns with Chukchi and  
Koryak). However, I now do think that our "attack" on Ch-Kamch was  
not well-founded (for different reasons) and I renounced it, so this  
may only count as an example for those who follow "me" here, which I  
myself no longer do...
Foley, in "The Papuan languages of Neu Guinea", reports some cases of  
pronoun borrowing (where, interestingly, 1st and 2nd p. swapped  
positions between two languages - sorry for from-the-top-of-my-head  
quotation, it will be easy to find in the book).

Since Ket has been mentioned, I cannot help mentioning an oblique  
example, maybe on a less serious note: Ket has and preserves its  
native personal pronouns, but when it comes to "written" Ket (there  
is a cyrillic-based orthography, taught in a few schools and used in  
a very limited number of publications by a very small number of  
authors), we find quite a number of Russian personal pronouns used  
where Ket pronouns would have to be expected (and certainly would  
have been available) - this certainly being an example of first  
language attrition, rather than of borrowing as such. A glaring  
example slipped onto the cover page of my recently published  
"Descriptive Grammar of Ket", where, in the sample of "Written Ket" I  
used to decorate the dust-jacket, the header of the story reads "Et  
digaraqng tIldingt" - "We live in the North", to be followed, in the  
first line of the actual story, by: "My (= Russian 'we') digaraqng...'.


On the second question: body (-part) metaphors are quite common for  
reflexive pronouns, e.g. Mongolian 'beye' "body = oneself", also used  
(as a borrowing, of course), in, i.a., Manchu; cf. further Georgian  
tavi "head", Arabic nafs "soul (if that counts as a body part) =  
oneself" and probably many more examples.


Stefan Georg




Am 07.08.2007 um 19:50 schrieb Michael Noonan:

> English 'they' is usually assumed to have been borrowed from an Old  
> Norse
> demonstrative and personal pronoun.
>
> In the Tibeto-Burman languages of which I have some knowledge, I'm not
> aware of any instances of borrowing of personal pronouns, even among
> languages which have borrowed extensively, including grammatical
> affixes/clitics.
>
> Mickey Noonan
>
> On Tue, 7 Aug 2007, Florian Siegl wrote:
>
>> Dear fellow typologists,
>>
>> I'm looking for instances and references concerning personal pronoun
>> borrowing [equivalents of I, YOU, HE] in Eurasia. Available  
>> literature
>> concentrates on the Americas, South and South-East Asia but as far as
>> Eurasia is concerned, I have not yet found more instances than one  
>> clear
>> example (Ket --> Forest Enets). However, this example did not make it
>> into the general literature so far and I wonder if pronoun  
>> borrowing is
>> really so extraordinary in Eurasia and whether there are no other  
>> known
>> instances.
>>
>> My second question concerns pronouns in a global context; Are  
>> there any
>> languages attested whose personal pronouns are derived from  
>> lexemes such
>> as body or any other possible body part and if yes, are these  
>> pronouns
>> considered to be etymologically old or are they more recent
>> grammaticalizations? Any reference welcome...
>>
>> Best wishes,
>>
>> Florian Siegl
>>
>
> Michael Noonan			
> Professor of Linguistics
> Dept. of English		
> University of Wisconsin		
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