Pronouns in Euraisa and elsewhere

[Erdal at EM.UNI-FRANKFURT.DE]

Ottoman Turkish bendeniz was polite for 'I'. I consists of Persian  
bende 'slave' + the 2nd pers. pl. possessive suffix; e.g. 'your slave'  
Since, however, the noun bende stopped being understandable to Turks  
and since Turkish 'I' is 'ben', bendeniz was metanalysed into ben +  
what was felt to be some suffix of politeness.
I also tend to think the 1st person singular clitic pronoun (i.e.  
corresponding to French 'je') of Turkish and Azeri was borrowed from  
Persian (while Ottoman still had the old +ven in use).
Turkic borrowing of reflexives is more common, Chuvash and Chaghatay  
adopting Iranian forms, while some Northeast-Asian languages borrowed  
the Mongol word for 'body' to serve as reflexive pronoun.
All the best,
Marcel Erdal

Quoting Florian Siegl <florian.siegl at GMX.NET>:

> 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
>