Thursday, 5 March 2009

At the other end of the formality spectrum is kembi, you sir, ma'am, your honour, etc. The accompanying first person pronoun is bonduh, your servant. The plural forms are kembiga and bonduhta.

I should note in the first version of this language tete was not reduplication, it was an infix of et. The same held for the first person me and meme. It looks like in the current version of the language these have been returned to the verb.

Wednesday, 4 March 2009

you and thou

The informal pronoun ako, you, comes from the Old High Eclectic verb stem adako, to be in the presence. In the first version of this language I had the second person pronouns te and tete (singular and plural). I was thinking that in this version these pronouns are replaced with tu and vos from an old Indo-European language I started to design between version one and Brithenig. My notes say allow for a familiar thou-pronoun, and I suspect that ako is going to push out tu. I may keep it in a reduced form as a suffix -t

Monday, 2 March 2009

Pronouns in a langauge of courtesy

Note to self: omae, which appears in my notes on Japanese courtesy language means '(honorific) ([thing/person] in front of me)' according to an email on the Conlang list that I read today. This means I can reconstruct it in OT2.0.