zompist bboard

How can a language be personless? How would I say

I am free

or

You are not a coward!

what are you even talking about

The one who speaks, that one is free.
The one who listens, that one is not a cow.

I don't know of any real-world language that does this, but you might throw it into one of those languages spoken by people who differ linguistically from humans only in one or two very small ways. Those seem to be all the rage now.

no, that still isn't personless. a language is personless when there is no way whatsoever to mark person, and hence sentences like in the OP are impossible to express. cool feature for an alien lang, but I suspect dfiller is just abusing terminology.

Actually, I know what I 'm talking about. How about a language without 1st person singular. How might that be expressed. Would I say somethin like, "The person nearest"?
Would pronouns only express number, or something else?
Would I say:

Singular wants water

instead of

I/ You/ He/ She/ It wants water

I think remember reading somewhere that some languages don't differ 2d and 3d person.

So the difference is between speaker and non speaker. (Perhaps, to quote a movie, "it puts the lotion on its skin.")

I guess you could have 1st/2d v. 3d and have a speech act participant v. non-speech act participant distinction.

Eliminating any sort of distinction seems difficult, other than, perhaps, having people going around saying existential nothings.

As far as I understand this is one of those projects to convince yourself that ambiguity and renaming are equivalent to deletion. Hint: they are not.

Consider a language where there is no personal marking and no morphologically unique personal pronouns. Personal information is instead coded by demonstratives: "this person" can mean 1st person as well as a proximal third person and "that person" can mean 2nd person as well as a distal third person. Many a conlanger has at this stage contently gone on to announce they had made a personless language. They had, in fact, not. All they did was to make a language whose personal information is coded in a strange way, and whose personal pronouns are ambiguous (even though they most likely would not be in actual spoken context, as demonstrative use can be accompanied by deontic gestures such as finger pointing).

Other example: seeking to evade this, the conlanger instead declares that to indicate the first person, "the speaker", and to indicate the second person, "the listener" must be used. In this case the language is even less personless than before, as unwittingly the conlanger has recreated new personal pronouns by grammaticalising nouns.

My point is that a language is not "personless" unless it is impossible to express information about agency. Since you are clearly going for one of the above strategies, and definitely not for elimination of agency information, I would say that my statement that you were

Sir Gwalchafad wrote:abusing terminology

is, in fact, quite correct.

My advice is therefore that you stop it.

2+3 clusivity wrote:I think remember reading somewhere that some languages don't differ 2d and 3d person.

So the difference is between speaker and non speaker. (Perhaps, to quote a movie, "it puts the lotion on its skin.")

I guess you could have 1st/2d v. 3d and have a speech act participant v. non-speech act participant distinction.

Eliminating any sort of distinction seems difficult, other than, perhaps, having people going around saying existential nothings.

IIRC that is not attested in "some languages". It is attested in "a language", and that language is not a full language - it's a semi-ritual register of another language, viz. Damin (which is a register of Lardil).

Maybe i'm missing something, but couldn't you just refer to everything by its name? My name is Kris, so i would say 'Kris wants a cookie'; your name is Steve, so i would say 'Steve wants a cookie'; etc. A language like this (that never developed (conventional?) pronouns) would have some interesting ways of expressing and getting around ambiguity.

Japanese is kind of like this. People actively avoid using pronouns, and it is extremely common, and in fact preferable, to use a person's name, title, etc. rather than a pronoun. Use of one's own name instead of a pronoun is standard among children (and women trying to sound cute). Also, pronouns, other than being deictic, behave no differently from other nouns. They can take relative clauses quite naturally, and have their origin on regular nouns. And because of this, there is a kind of pronoun treadmill, where old pronouns eventually stop getting used, and new ones appear.

Maybe i'm missing something, but couldn't you just refer to everything by its name? My name is Kris, so i would say 'Kris wants a cookie'; your name is Steve, so i would say 'Steve wants a cookie'; etc. A language like this (that never developed (conventional?) pronouns) would have some interesting ways of expressing and getting around ambiguity.

Now that I think about it. that is a good idea; but it reminds me of how mothers speak to babies.
Still, I might play around with that!

My language Greater Atlian has a personless or pseudo-personless system employing ideas similar to those described by Sir Gwalchafad above. First and second person are encoded either:

(a) by using the same pronouns as for the third person, so that for "I am free" one might say in effect "He is free" (alternative translation "One is free") - these forms double as demonstratives "this/that one";

(b) by using the phrases "the speaker", "the hearer(s)".

Sir Gwalchafad's description doesn't apply entirely, however. Firstly, Greater Atlian makes no proximal/distal distinction - one does not say "this one" for oneself and "that one" for another, because the two are expressed in the same way anyway. Secondly, the phrases "the speaker", "the hearer" are not simply personal pronouns that look like nouns, as there isn't a one-to-one match between their use and the way "true" first/second person pronouns are used. If you were asking questions to a speaker at a conference, you might well refer to him/her as "the speaker" and yourself as "the hearer" - the opposite way around from normal. You could also use "the speaker", "the hearer" to refer to third parties who were speaking/hearing. Furthermore, you'd generally only use these phrases in cases of possible ambiguity and otherwise would use the (a) forms, whereas in real languages you refer to yourself as "I" by default and calling yourself "he/she" or "one" is stylistically marked.

The point of what I was saying is that regardless of how ambiguous or intransparent it is there is always a way to mark person as long as you can pinpoint the agency. Therefore, there are two types of languages:

1. Languages that in any form whatsoever communicate who participated or was affected by an action.
2. Personless languages.

Sir Gwalchafad wrote:The point of what I was saying is that regardless of how ambiguous or intransparent it is there is always a way to mark person as long as you can pinpoint the agency. Therefore, there are two types of languages:

1. Languages that in any form whatsoever communicate who participated or was affected by an action.
2. Personless languages.

That's getting pedantic though. It's only really useful to talk about person as it manifests in the grammar, and since you can have a language without personal pronouns or markings for person, you can effectively have a 'personless' language.

If you're going to be dense go be dense somewhere else.

For the last time, it doesn't matter how you gloss something or what secondary meanings it has, unless you delete the information it carries you have not deleted the element. I have been saying for quite some time now that

Valkura wrote:you can have a language without personal pronouns or markings for person

is untrue, as

Valkura wrote:person as it manifests in the grammar

does not depend on whether you decide to call something person marking or not, but on whether person information is transmitted, and that therefore, unless you delete participant information entirely,

Valkura wrote:you can effectively have a personless language

THIS. IS. WRONG.

Jesus Christ people why is this so hard?

Sir Gwalchafad wrote:Jesus Christ people why is this so hard?

I know that all languages talk about things that are either yourself, something you're talking to, or something else. Person is defined in such a way that, yes, it's impossible to have a real personless language, because person is omnipresent — that's why it's only useful in a conlanging context to talk about person as it relates to surface forms. If you don't have pronouns or inflection for person or anything like that, then you don't have words that are only distinguished by their person. Steve might be the second person, but 'Steve wants a cookie' doesn't reflect that. A language lacking any marking for person, while still having person because it's impossible not to, could effectively be called personless. You could find better terms for it, but it's a short and easy label, and informally i think it works fairly well.

I am pedantic about this because of three reasons: first off, the practice of half-assedly removing marking for something and then going "I have made an X-less language" is as widespread as it is horrible. Second, it IS possible to have a personless language, and it is one of these features of pervasive reorganization of information that characterize a good alien lang. Third, just say "person marking-less language". That's ten more characters. If you're in a hurry you can abbreviate to PML, but there's no reason to say "personless" unless you mean it, because it might lead people to assume that you are dumber than you are.

Addendum to points one and two above: removal of surface marking or any other half-assed violations of linguistic universals are instant demotions of your conlang to "horrible". Either you're making a human language, and then if you please you should obey the laws of the natural world (and by extension be able to come up with original features within these constraints), or you're making a deliberately alien language, in which case, if this sort of thing is the best you can come up with, it isn't very good either.

Sir Gwalchafad wrote:I am pedantic about this because of three reasons: first off, the practice of half-assedly removing marking for something and then going "I have made an X-less language" is as widespread as it is horrible. Second, it IS possible to have a personless language, and it is one of these features of pervasive reorganization of information that characterize a good alien lang. Third, just say "person marking-less language". That's ten more characters. If you're in a hurry you can abbreviate to PML, but there's no reason to say "personless" unless you mean it, because it might lead people to assume that you are dumber than you are.

Addendum to points one and two above: removal of surface marking or any other half-assed violations of linguistic universals are instant demotions of your conlang to "horrible". Either you're making a human language, and then if you please you should obey the laws of the natural world (and by extension be able to come up with original features within these constraints), or you're making a deliberately alien language, in which case, if this sort of thing is the best you can come up with, it isn't very good either.

Good points. Alien languages most of the time aren't nearly alien enough for my liking (although i understand how hard it is to think outside the box when you're using the box itself to think). It would be really interesting to see an actual personless language.

One of my conalngs, Andanese, has no person system at lest the way I analyze it. It can only distinguish "self" vs "non-self". To put a very simplified view on it, "nonself" usually means 2nd person, and "nonself + nonself" usually means 3rd person. THis language is for humans, but of a very distant breed that is too different physically from other humans to feel comfortable wth most of them (but they do live in cities with Pabaps because Pabaps are smaller and more gentle than msot humans)

Only Sir Gwalchafad gets it.

cromulant wrote:Only Sir Gwalchafad gets it.

Hallow is wrong.

You can have personless languages. Person is an indexed category. If you use non-indexical expressions instead, you will have a personless language.

However, avoiding indexicals for agents is difficult, without introducing ridiculous ambiguity and confusion. Two ways spring to mind: names and pre-determined properties.

The naming approach has been mentioned already. If you refer to everyone by name, your language has no 'person' involved. [You can tell because, for instance, the same event related by two different protagonists in the event would be related the same way - with person, it wouldn't be (one person's I is another's you, but everyone Kris remains everyone else's Kris).

By 'pre-determined' property, I mean that it's agreed on in advance what property or properties should be used as primary identification of individuals. Two different approaches to this would seem feasible. One is to use objective properties. Refer to everyone, by, say, their height - "the six foot two one punched the five foot eight one" and so forth. The other is to use relative properties. So, "the tallest one punched the third-tallest one". This has the fun feature of being highly context-dependent (a taller person walks into the room and everyone else's "name" changes!), but it isn't person-dependent (the utterance does not vary if you change the speaker or the listener), so it's not a form of grammatical person.

In either property-based approach, these terms could be reduced to very simple pronouns. And even so with the name-based approach, if there's only a small number of allowable names (or allowable parts-of-names-that-are-used-as-pronouns, since these 'names' needn't be the same as their ordinary names).


[However, Hallow was right to disagree with everyone else, who weren't getting it]

Salmoneus wrote:The other is to use relative properties. So, "the tallest one punched the third-tallest one". This has the fun feature of being highly context-dependent (a taller person walks into the room and everyone else's "name" changes!), but it isn't person-dependent (the utterance does not vary if you change the speaker or the listener), so it's not a form of grammatical person.

Hungh! Never thought of that. That's a pretty interesting idea. Keep up the discussion.

That sort of reminds me of languages which are claimed to use non-egocentric directions. Quick search gave me, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guugu_Yimithirr_language, as an example.

I suppose you could use directional marking--non-egocentric . . . or maybe ego-centric as well--as a replacement for person. Maybe looking at *gasp* the toolbox of odd ideas, ithkuil, is in order.

That relative property idea is pretty cool, perhaps I can think about that. That'd surely be alien!