Summary: number in personal pronouns

[Paul Hopper]

It may be just a bit off topic, but this discussion leads into "teknonymy",
identifying adults by the names of their children (e.g. in Malay a woman
might be referred to as Mak Fatima, "Fatima's Mum", and this would be her
principal designation in the community.) It's common in Malay and related
languages, also in Temiar and other indigenous languages in that area.
There's quite a bit of literature on this.

Paul

---------------------------
Paul Hopper
Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of the Humanities
Department of English
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA
Telephone (412) 268-7174
Fax (412) 268-7989


--On Friday, April 18, 2003 9:53 AM +0400 Nina Dobrushina or Michael Daniel
<daniel at QUB.COM> wrote:

Re: Suzanne Kemmer and Enrique Palancar Vizcaya:
I remember having read about languages where 'wife' is usually designated
descriptively - as 'my children's mother'. I do not know whether it is used
as a form of address (which then would contradict Pier Marco Bertinetto's
tentative generalization) or only as third person reference (which would be
a bit less to the topic of the discussion).

Note that Edith's example ("I went to Spain for a vacation" instead of "My
family and I went to Spain for a vacation" - both possible in Russian, to my
mind) extends the discussion of obligatory mention of co-possessors to the
obligatory co-participants of a situation in general.

Michael




---------------------------
Paul Hopper
Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of the Humanities
Department of English
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA
Telephone (412) 268-7174
Fax (412) 268-7989