Summary: number in personal pronouns

[Gideon Goldenberg]

Dear typologists,
Well, "teknonymy", or whatever we call it, is the usual way of
referring to a man or a woman in the Arab and Moslem world. All
that, however, like the pronominal "formes de politesse" or "demi-
politesse" do not really belong to linguistic types but rather
to social life of the speakers. Moving to another social milieu
may change the habit of speakers without changing their language.
Variation within speakers of the same language may be found similar
to that between different languages. Differences in social behaviour
might be regarded as interesting not less than linguistic typology, &
familiarity with social structure is needed for well understanding
a language, but after all the boundaries between different uses
as here discussed often do not coincide with the boundaries between
languages. The structure of pronominal systems is another matter,
and will be found to be of great linguistic interest.
                                          Yours, Gideon Goldenberg

>.........................
>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