Dexis/Demonstrative

[Radagast]

The deal is that you'd be avoiding them. The question is can we conceive of adevelopment where humans become aware of others and of speaking to others without also creating words that adress the relations between speakers and others and the space where speaking occurs - I personally don't think it is even a remote possibility.

[Richard W]

[quote="Radagast"d]Can speakers even begin to speak with each other without deictic pronouns (you/ I for example)?[/quote]
1st and 2s singular pronouns can definitely be avoided. I had quite a bit of practice avoiding them in Thai.

[Whimemsz]

But we're not talking about modern languages, after thousands of years of development; the context of Radagast's quote is the first human languages: would it have been possible for early humans to begin speaking something approaching true "human" language with one another before they had any sort of deictic system?

[zompist]

But we're not talking about modern languages, after thousands of years of development; the context of Radagast's quote is the first human languages: would it have been possible for early humans to begin speaking something approaching true "human" language with one another before they had any sort of deictic system?

Not if deixis precedes language.

[Radagast]

That is tautological of course. But the point is that I am fairly sure that most evidence points to believing that deixis does precede language and that language in a human sense therefore presupposes deixis.

[Count Iblis]

I don't know how that would be possible. Can speakers even begin to speak with each other without deictic pronouns (you/ I for example)?

Mecislau thinks avoiding personal pronouns is possible (even if avoiding personal pronouns sounds rather tiring after a while), but other pronouns can be much trickier.

Yeah, it's possible.