zompist bboard

I know there's inclusive and exclusive "we"s (1PL) - inclusive being "We - I, the speaker, and you the listener" and exclusive being "We - I, the speaker, and someone else but not you, the listener."

And I imagine you can put numbers on that: we (dual), etc.

But does any language -- natural or otherwise -- have a category for saying that the speaker and the listener are both doing something, but separately?

For instance, saying "We could go eat" with the understanding of "We will each go to our respective houses and eat, apart, before meeting up against later."

Or, where I got the idea, a song lyric called "You could be happy", and I mentally changed to "we could be happy", but in the context it only makes sense if we are both being happy, but not with each other.

So, I suppose, a "first personal non-commitative plural"?

Some languages (e.g. Navajo) have a distinction between collective and distributive plural. First person distributive could be used to convey the nuances you're thinking about. I don't know if any of these languages also contrasts inclusive vs. exclusive though.

I wouldn't be surprised if some languages did this by number discongruence, e.g. we could go.sg and eat.sg vs. we could go.pl and eat.pl

Hmm, interesting idea. English could distinugish just by adding "each" to the verb, so maybe there's a language that has that fused onto the verb in a way that it could be considered an inflection. Or, like you said, it could be the pronoun that changes ... which might work better since you would sometimes have to do it in sentences with no subject or no object.

Collective vs distributive plural, no? And it works in any person.