Pronouns: follow up

[Florian Siegl]

During the last 24h I received a total of 17 e-mails on-list and 
off-list regarding my query. Thank you very much for answering and 
providing both references and further examples!
Concerning my second question: I received a fair amount of comments and 
examples regarding the origin of reflexive pronouns though this is not 
what I'm looking for. Paraphrasing my intended question:

- I'm interested in languages whose personal pronouns (!) are derived 
from body parts. If such personal pronouns are somehow derived from 
earlier reflexive pronouns this is fine, but I'm not looking for 
reflexive pronouns.

- If a language has body part based personal pronouns, are they 
considered to be etymologically old (reconstructable into a 
proto-language) or are they more recent innovations? What about the 
history of the other personal pronouns?

- As demonstrative pronouns tend to be grammaticalized as 3rd person 
pronouns, are there any languages known which have a body part based 
pronoun for 3rd person pronouns? One possible example seems to be Tundra 
Nenets, Uralic: body + POSS.3SG his body --> (s)he. Nick Enfield pointed 
out off-list, that Thai and Lao use such pronouns for 1st and 2nd person 
(but also for reflexives).

- Is there any attested language which has a full set of personal 
pronouns consisting of body parts?

Florian Siegl


P.S. As a slip of the keyboard, I forgot to include English THEY from 
Old Norse in my yesterday's query on Eurasia which was mentioned several 
times. Guess one forgets the usual when looking for the unusual. 
Concerning pronoun borrowing in Eurasia, the list of good candidates 
seems to limited. English (from Old Norse), Forest Enets (from Ket), 
several Romani varieties (see posting by Matras), Siewierska 2004 
(274-277) has some additional examples from Dravidian and 
inclusive/exclusive categories in Indo-Aryan languages in the 
neighborhood of Dravidian languages.