Summary: number in personal pronouns

[Dan Everett]

Paul is certainly right about this. Teknonymy is quite common and the
examples from Aikhenvald are indeed common throughout the Amazon and
elsewhere.

Best,

Dan


.........................
Dan Everett
Professor of Phonetics and Phonology
Department of Linguistics
Arts Building
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
M13 9PL
Manchester, UK
dan.everett at man.ac.uk
Phone: 44-161-275-3158
Dept. Fax and Phone: 44-161-275-3187
http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de

-----Original Message-----
From: Discussion List for ALT [mailto:LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG]
On Behalf Of Paul Hopper
Sent: Friday, April 18, 2003 2:18 PM
To: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Subject: Re: Summary: number in personal pronouns


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