Dative Pronouns

[Claire Bowern]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Perhaps I should give an outline of what I think happened in Pitta-Pitta
(and another language of the family, Arabana-Wangkangurru) as an example.
Steven Schaufele is right; I an interested in examples of the dative
becoming nominative, not dative/accusative becoming nominative, since that
is, in many contexts, practically equivalent to case loss, and that is
certainly not the case in Pitta-Pitta. All distinctions are preserved. I
have plenty of examples of dative and accusative falling together, and then
becoming nominative, such as English and Akkadian.
 
These are the stages I reconstruct for the pronoun changes in Pitta-Pitta.
It only happens in the first person singular, nowhere else. The ergative is
irrelevant but I put it in anyway for completeness. There are also all
sorts of other local cases (about 10 cases in all). ng = velar nasal and
nh, th, etc = lamino-dentals. ny, ty etc are lamino-palatals. nty is a
homorganic cluster. r is a retroflex continuant.
 
Stage  (Erg)     Nom     Acc     Dat
I.     ngathu    nganyi  nganha  ngantya
II.    ngathu    nganyi  nganya  ngantya    (possibly reanalysis of the acc
suffix as -a, not -nha. It's -a in 2nd person and ambiguous in 3rd person.
There's also a lot of alternation between the two laminal series, nh etc
and ny. The correspondence sets are awful (ie, pretty irregular) and it
looks as though the distinction might be quite recent and diffusing. Some
words in some close-by languages also have free variation between nh and
ny, with ny the more archaic and found in songs and place names.)
III.   ngathu    ngantya nganya  nganyari
 
Pitta-Pitta also has tense-based case marking. The original nominative (and
the nominative in most of the other Karnic languages (the subgroup to which
Pitta-Pitta belongs)), *nganyi turns up in a slightly altered form as the
marker of a "subject" (ie, nominative and ergative) in the future tense and
potential/obligative moods.
 
I don't know where the -ri in the dative comes from. Interestingly, most of
the local cases are built on the dative in other languages and other
persons/numbers of Pitta-Pitta and the stems used are really messy;
sometimes nganty-, sometimes ngany-.
 
Anyway, in Pitta-Pitta I don't think we can say that the acc and dative
fell together to give rise to the nominative, as in English or Akkadian.
The new dative might have been innovated on the accusative stem but it
still remains that the acc was basically unaffected and dative > nominative.
 
The same thing seems to have happened in Arabana-Wangkangurru, which is the
language spoken to the South of Pitta-Pitta (and associated dialects). By
the way, these languages are mostly dead now but used to be spoken in the
NE corner of South Australia and the SW corner of Queensland and into the
Northern Territory.
 
Hope this clears things up a bit.
 
The "her told I" pronoun exchange is a nice example (thanks!), but can it
be shown that 'her' is from the original OE dative, and not the ME acc/dat?
And are these still cased forms or are they uninflecting?
 
Regards,
 
Claire.
 
>>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>>Does anyone know of a language where a dative pronoun becomes the
>>nominative? I'm not really interested in languages where the dative and
>>accusative fall together, and then that case becomes "nominative". I have
>>an example from Pitta-Pitta (Pama-Nyungan) where the orginal 1sg dative
>>*ngantya turns up as nominative, a new dative stem is invented and
>>accusative is basically unaffected. I believe something similar happened in
>>Frisian but I would like some more examples if possible.
>
>