There’s been a lot of focus, including in my last post, on the question of pronouns recently, leading to peculiar responses such as where people say they “don’t have pronouns” or “don’t want to use pronouns”. This is weirdly ignorant but possibly reflects too strong a focus on a particular aspect of pronouns. Because of the way English works, most of this focus is on the third person and singular number versus the plural number, because English pronouns only explicitly express what we think of as gender in the third person. It could be said that there is some gendering of other pronouns, for instance I wouldn’t be surprised if married women are more likely to say “we” when referring to themselves than married men are, but the fact remains that we don’t perceive this variation much.
Today, though, I want to focus on the other pronouns, both personal and otherwise, because they tend to be lost in the heat of battle but are nonetheless interesting. These other pronouns, though not gendered in English, often are in other languages, but their gender is not the main thing I want to mention, because, to quote myself, “it’s the least interesting thing about them”. Well, usually. I will actually start with that though, and with the personal pronouns.
The basic system many languages have of personal pronouns is that they have singular and plural each of the first, second and third person: I, we, thou, you, it and they. English is unusual in this respect in that it lacks “thou”, more or less. Many languages have distinct polite and informal versions of “you” and distinct singular and plural versions of “you”, which can overlap such that plural “you” is often also polite “you”.
Urgh. I said I wasn’t going to discuss gender but I will because it’s worth getting it out of the way. In English we’re used to the third person singular pronouns being kind of gendered but actually not really. I’ll demonstrate. If for some reason we wanted to use “she”, “it” and “he” with an adjective, it wouldn’t vary according to that pronoun. Attributive adjectives are ungrammatical in English, but predicatives are very common, although in many Western European languages those don’t vary for gender. So, we say “she is tall” and “he is short”, but in French we’d add an “-e” for the feminine adjective. This happens, so far as I can tell, only with hair colour in English: a woman is blonde or brunette but a man is blond or brunet, and to be honest if I ever see the word “brunet” written down I shall be very surprised indeed. It doesn’t even extend to other hair colours such as “white”, “red”, “auburn” or whatever. It’s also annoying because it defines women by hair colour. This is basically the only time we can be even remotely said to use grammatical gender. Oh, actually I’m wrong: it crops up in the fossilised phrase “lady chapel” because that actually means the chapel belonging to The Lady, and is not “lady’s chapel”, so that’s a gender distinction. That’s it though, and in fact most people would probably perceive “brunette” and “brunet” as different words rather than the same word with a different ending.
One distinction we lack in English is gender in the second and first pronouns. This occurs in Spanish but in that it almost feels like an afterthought, and doesn’t occur in all cases. In other languages they generally seem to be fully-fledged pronouns as simple and short as each other, as opposed to having adjectives appended to them as in Spanish. As I’ve said, I won’t dwell on this.
In Old English, and even into early Middle English, there were dual personal pronouns, to refer to two people, as “wit”/”unc” and “git” (pronounced “yit”)/”inc”, the possessives being “uncer” and “incer”. Dual pronouns reappear in Tok Pisin, the Pidgin English of Papua, in a different form, and in Bislama, spoken in Vanu Atu, there’s also a trial form, but there’s a further complication with these so I won’t mention them yet. Gothic dual personal pronouns were “wit” and “jut”. In modern Icelandic, although the form of the dual pronouns survive, their sense doesn’t. They’re plural, and I think the original plural forms are now the polite forms of the pronouns but I might have misremembered. I personally think dual personal pronouns are very useful and I still use them in my diary as it often seems weird to use a plural for when there are only two of something. Dual third person pronouns have not been found in any recorded Germanic language, or in Latin. In Gothic, the verbs also have a dual conjugation for the first and second person, but this has never been found in English.
Something I meant to say last time but didn’t is that the operation of plural nouns sometimes looks quite like gender in English. “Scissors”, “glasses” and “trousers” for example refer to singular objects but use the plural. It seems slightly odd that “bra” is singular, since it could be “brum”, with “bra” as a plural if the etymology is ignored. These uses of the plural for singular objects involves “they” and only seems to happen when there is a duality to the item in question, so it’s like a trace of the dual although in fact it isn’t because there are genuine traces of the dual in English and even in modern pronouns, which again I’ll come to.
English has separate personal and demonstrative third person pronouns. Some other languages combine the two. The demonstratives are “this”, “that”, “these” and “those” and correspond in English also to the older words for “the” in the non-instrumental sense. Latin, Spanish and many other languages have three demonstratives, corresponding to the three persons, as in “hoc” (this by me), “iste” (that by you) and “id” (that over there). English gets by with just two, “this” and “that”. Remarkably, I think anyway although I’ve never come across anyone else mentioning it, Gothic has only one demonstrative in spite of generally making the finest distinctions of all Germanic languages: “þata”, which means both “this” and “that”. It’s the only language I’m aware of which only has one. Spanish does the same as Latin, with “eso”, “esto” and “aquel”, but as with some other Romance languages the referents have changed somewhat. There’s a language in Papua whose demonstrative pronouns refer to things like “towards the mountain”, “towards the lake” and so forth and there are very many of them. I thought this was Alamblak but apparently that just does the same as Spanish and Latin although its counting is peculiar, being based on 1, 2, 5 and 20 multiplied and added in various ways.
The real ‘Flowers For Algernon‘ personal pronouns for me are the inclusive and exclusive first person plurals. I found out about this distinction when I was about eleven and ever since it’s felt like a niggling but major problem for the English language. Remarkably, the vast majority of Indo-European languages get along without the distinction. It’s very simple, although I should warn you, you can’t unsee it once you know: many languages distinguish between “we but not you” and “you and I”. Austronesian languages such as Indonesian make this distinction, as do Dravidian languages. In the former case they also have an extra, dual number, meaning that there are five first person pronouns as opposed to the English two. I honestly can’t understand why we haven’t got these. It has been noted, though, that Indo-European words for “we” fall into two categories: ones of the “we” form and ones of the “nous” form. This suggests that clusivity did once exist in Proto-Indo-European but it didn’t even survive until the earliest form of the separate branches. Under the influence of Dravidian, some Indian languages do have this distinction although it isn’t related to these forms. I would say Papuan languages have this, but the thing about them is that there are hundreds and they vary a lot, so it’s possible to find many features in them which are present sporadically throughout the world.
This next bit is a bit mind-boggling in a peculiar way. It is technically possible for “you” to be inclusive or exclusive! This is interestingly difficult to think about. When one talks to someone, one says “thou” or “you”, but the “you”, being dual or plural, could refer to both or all the people one is addressing or it could refer to the people present and also to people not present. For instance, one could talk to a person and their partner, or one could talk to a person as part of the couple when the other person isn’t present. This apparently never happens though, even though it’s possible, and it’s thought by some linguists that this category of personal pronoun is impossible for the human mind to conceive of sufficiently clearly to exist. This raises further questions as to the nature of language. One linguist claims that this distinction is present in a critically-endangered language spoken in Vanu Atu called Southeast Ambryn, spoken by about three thousand people. I don’t think it’s that one can’t conceive of it. To me it seems simpler than split ergativity to get my head round. It’s more that someone who knows such a language would have to keep doing it, and as such it might inform issues around pronouns and gender identity, particularly xenopronouns.
Another confounding fact is that there are sometimes exclusive and inclusive words for “I”, kind of. Where there’s a regular way in which duals and plurals can be related to singular pronouns, it’s possible for the two versions of “wit” and “we” to be extrapolated back to “I” and continue to give two forms. That probably isn’t very clear, so I’ll illustrate with fake English pronouns. Suppose we had exclusive and inclusive versions of “we”, such as “wee” and “nee”, and then “yee” for “you”, and the vowel changes in all of them to “oo” in the singular, so “yoo” could be the singular word for “you”. There could then be “woo” and “noo” for the inclusive and exclusive words for “I”. Samoan does this. Its plural inclusive “we” is “mātou” and exclusive “tātou”, the duals are “mā‘ua,” and “tā‘ua” and the singulars “a‘u” and “tā”, although some of these pronouns have variants. Interestingly, you might think that if a number were to collapse into another one to simplify a language, the dual and the plural would merge, but in Samoan the dual and the singular merge instead. “Tā” can mean “I” or “we two”. The exclusive “I” is the usual word, and the inclusive “I” indicates emotional involvement, so for example in “am I going to get one then?”, we use the word “then” to signal emotional involvement, and translating that into Samoan would use the word “tā” and omit “then”. In the closely related Tongan, it’s more connected with modesty and is similar to how posh people use the word “one” in English for “I”.
There’s also a fourth person in some languages, known as the obviative. This is actually not only obviative but obvious, and I used to wonder why it doesn’t happen in English in particular. The obviative contrasts with the proximate, which is the only option in most European languages. It crosses over with the idea of topic prominence, and involves a distinction between more and less important items, so for example, “did you put the food on the table?” where the food is the focus, is “did you put it (PROX) on it (OBV)?” but if it was a table as opposed to a kitchen counter and that was the emphasis, “table” would be the proximate and the food obviative. Presumably this is less important in languages with gender, but as a language without gender it’s seemed odd that we don’t have it. This feeling, unlike the clusivity issue, actually pre-dates any knowledge I had of languages other than English, rather like my daughter’s abortive used of numerical classifiers when she was a toddler, and it makes me wonder how often young children stumble upon features of language absent from their native ones and then reject them as their ability in their first language improves.
English has the distinct and separate reflexive pronouns ending in “-self” and “-selves”. These vary in the third person with dialect, such that “hisself” and “theirselves” is sometimes used in non-standard English consistent with the other pronouns being possessive rather than objective. In many other languages these either don’t exist or the objective forms are used, and in some there is a specific dedicated pronoun for this purpose. In Scandinavian languages this pronoun has become part of the verb and provides them with a mediopassive voice, replacing an older mediopassive found in Gothic. The fact that our own reflexive pronouns are so long means we’re unlikely to develop this way of expressing anything from verbs this way, although the potential used to exist.
The other pronouns also exist. In particular, the English distinction between “who” and “what” is peculiar for our language in that it’s similar to a common vs neuter distinction rather than there being three gender-like forms here. We tend to get confused about “whom” and there seems to be incipient reluctance to say “whose” instead of “of which” or something similar when the referent is inanimate. I said I was going to return to the dual number. In fact this does have some traces in English, and one of these is found in the word “whether”. Nowadays this is used as a conjunction, but it clearly looks a bit like “either” and a bit like “which”, “either” and “neither” being other traces of the dual. “Whether” was previously the dual version of “which”, which has taken over its meaning. There are other remnants too, such as “both” instead of “all”, the slightly vague “couple” and less vague “pair”, and the more contentious “alternative” which can only correctly refer to one of two rather than one of many. Trial pronouns exist in Bislama and Tok Pisin, and also in some Austronesian languages. Lihir also has a paucal number for small numbers of items above three. Paucal seems more obvious than trial and just plain having a plural to me but it’s rare in reality. Sursurunga was thought to have a quadral number but in fact it simply starts to use a different kind of paucal at four and has a “lesser” paucal for two or three, so in fact there seem to be no languages at all, at least right now, with a quadral number.
Vietnamese, I recently discovered through a relative, has a large number of personal pronouns which relate to status and familial relationship, making distinctions which English doesn’t even make with kinship terms. These are all in the second person. Like Japanese and Indonesian/Malay, Vietnamese has formal and informal versions of the first person singular pronoun. The Malay/Indonesian polite word for “I” originally meant “slave”.
There are no languages which don’t have at least two numbers for one or more pronouns. That’s a linguistic universal. However, there are many which manage without what most languages seem to consider vital, including English with its single word for “you”. German shows that it’s possible to get away with a single word for “you”, “she” and “they”, although it doesn’t actually do this most of the time, with “Sie” and “sie”. It probably manages because the verb is inflected differently. Spanish and Portuguese have both adopted noun phrases for polite second person pronouns, namely “Vuestra Merced” and “a senhora”/”o senhor” respectively, and American Spanish rarely uses “tu” and “vosotros”/”vosotras”. Mandarin Chinese substitutes the word for “humble” for the first person singular and “honour” for the second person in polite speech. This is paralleled in the considerably more elaborate Japanese system. In fact it’s been argued that Japanese doesn’t actually have pronouns as such. It’s a topic-prominent language which tends to drop pronouns and nouns often start being used as pronouns which weren’t before. Several other East Asian languages are like this. Indonesian uses the word “tidak” (“thing”) for “it” when “it” refers to something as opposed to in a phrase like “it’s raining”. There’s also the very common phenomenon of pro-drop, which occurs in many European languages whose verbs are sufficiently inflected for the person to be indicated by them. Outside Europe, for instance in Swahili, verbs can be inflected for object, and even indirect object, as well as subject, meaning that a word such as “nitaiosha” means “I will wash it” (in Japanese, incidentally, this same word means “similar company”. There’s a group of unrelated languages whose words can sometimes be identical, Finnish being another.). Pronoun dropping is foreign to all Germanic languages as far as I know except possibly Gothic, although we do have pronoun avoidance. For instance, we sometimes consider “she” and “it” to be rude when referring to human adults.
This brings up the issue of how to avoid pronouns for political reasons, i.e. anti-sexism. English has difficulty with this in regular speech and writing although note form does it. For instance, I might write “Went to the shop” in my diary, although only if the day was particularly boring or I wanted to indicate I was breaking the Sabbath or something. There’s also “Would Madam like some wine?” or “Your Majesty”, “Your Grace”, “Your Worship” and so forth, although these last three include possessive adjectives similar in form to pronouns. The situation in Vietnamese, previously mentioned, seems to be that kinship terms are used instead of the second person.
What’s the minimum number of personal pronouns a language could get away with? Although the answer is obviously “zero”, because it could just use nouns, or each pronoun could have a use as a noun, which happens for example with “Ich” in German, I think the sensible answer is probably two, similarly to “this” and “that”. There’s “this person”/”these people” and “that person or thing”, meaning “you” or “she”/”he”/”it”/”they”. The fact that Gothic doesn’t distinguish between “this” and “that” might indicate that only one is needed, but that language had plenty of other pronouns which might indicate how it coped with that odd deficit. At the other end of the scale, there could be singular, dual, trial, paucal and plural numbers, inclusive and exclusive “we” and “you”, a three-person based system for the third and fourth persons and polite forms for all of them in five genders per person, those being feminine, indefinite gender, neuter, common, masculine and virile (a gender for male persons used in Polish). This technically yields five hundred pronouns, although some of them might make no sense. It can in fact be taken a lot further than that, but five hundred might be enough.
A Box Of Chocolates 