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On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 02:34:17PM -0400, John Vertical wrote: > On Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:04:21 -0700, Garth Wallace wrote: > > > >English "it" is not distal, it's totally nonspecific in that regard. > >It's just third person neuter. > > Hmm. So does a pronoun need to be specific enuff as "that over there" (still > visible?) to be included as distal? And is _that_ distal or medial? It's rather that we no longer have a distal category in our thinking. Things are either here or not-here. > I've generally been taught of Finnish _se_ as a demonstrativ pronoun, while > it seems to function largely identically to English _it_. I'm now not sure > if I'm wrong in connecting the Finnish and English systems, or the Finnish > and Romance systems. I never studied enough Finnish to realize that "se" worked as a demonstrative pronoun in addition to its ordinary pronounhood. So I also thought it was like "it", but I had a complementary misconception to yours :) tylakèhlpë'fö, Amanda