On 29 December 2011 12:07, Padraic Brown <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> --- On Thu, 12/29/11, Logan Kearsley <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> On 29 December 2011 09:56, Jim Henry
>> <[log in to unmask]>
>> wrote:
>> [...]
>> >> My next favorite part so far is the personal
>> pronoun system, which
>> >> looks like this:
>> >
>> > I like the gendered first and second-person pronouns;
>> they seem
>> > appropriate for this kind of language.  One of my
>> sketchlangs had
>>
>> So I thought. Usually I like to eliminate redundancy, and
>> explicit
>> gender marking in a language only intended to be spoken or
>> written by
>> two people who are quite sure of their own gender is
>> somewhat
>> redundant. But it just seemed very aesthetically
>> appropriate here, enough so to overcome my other biases.
>
> Perhaps you could look at it not so much as the "masculine" first person
> pronoun, but rather as "Logan's" first person pronoun. In such a private
> language, that pronoun can only refer to you, just like her pronoun can
> only refer to her. Doesn't make much sense to identify it as a gendered
> pronoun. It's more of a individualized pronoun.

Practically speaking, that may end up being the case. I kinda wanna
leave it officially open, though, on the off chance that I may get my
kids to learn the language someday. I did, after all, bother to
include a second person plural, for precisely the same reason. It may
end up being the single least-used morpheme in the language. ;)

>> The choice to use gendered pronouns was largely a reaction
>> to the
>> decision to have no verb conjugation at all- thus, gender
>> had to be in
>> the pronouns if it was gonna be anywhere- and that desire
>> for
>> unchanging verb forms combined with the reassertion of my
>> dislike of
>> pragmatic redundancy works against using gendered verb
>> stems.
>
> Okay. But when the language has precisely two speakers, each of which is
> always aware of the gender of both the speaker and the hearer, why do you
> need to have gender at all in the 1st and 2nd persons? Your 1st person
> pronoun is always masc. and your 2nd person pronoun is always fem. Opposite
> for hers. Or is it just because you wanted to express gender *somewhere*
> in the language?

That is precisely it. As a purely aesthetic matter, because it seemed
thematically appropriate, we wanted gender to be explicitly expressed.
I think it's a slightly Whorfian nod towards maintaining awareness of
the romantic relationship that forms the background culture of the
language, so every time I use the second person I think not "I'm
talking to you" but "I'm talking to my woman!"

> Not that I'm complaining, mind! Just curious. Since it seems that one of
> the design criteria is secrecy, having different pronouns will keep others
> guessing -- for a while anyway.

Ah yes, that too. I hadn't actually thought of the pronoun system in
that light before.

On 29 December 2011 12:19, Daniel Bowman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> My conlang Angosey marks gender using gender-same (same gender as the
> speaker) and gender-opposite (opposite gender of the speaker).  Perhaps
> that is a solution for this language as well?  That way you don't have to
> encode "masculine" and "feminine".

That's a neat idea. I've got a few languishing sketches that I might
be able to use that in.

Thanks to Jim Henry, by the way, for talking about the -zwa suffix in
gja-zym-byn. Remembering that gave me the idea for how to derive a
word for "fiance(e)" from the root for "marriage". This ended up
resulting in a neat and totally unplanned interplay of language
features. I have no word for husband/wife or fiance(e), but there are
patient-nominalizations from the verbal root for marriage that result
in a generic "spouse", which is inalienably possessed- and all of the
possessive pronouns are conveniently gendered! So we get "Mir amriwa"*
for "fiancee"-with-two-e's because I am male, and "Tar amriwa" for
"fiance"-with-one-e because she is female. That just gave me a little
shiver of puzzle-fitting-together-by-accident serendipity-joy.
Clearly, this would not work so well for homosexual couples.

-logan.

*"mi.r aM-Ri.wa", "me-masc.GEN marry-PAT.prospective"