@@fenugreekqueen6805 3:37 First-person markers have more number distinctions than second, and second more than third. However, in Classical Arabic, the first person only has 2 (singular and plural) while the second and third have 3, (singular, dual, and plural) 6:15 Artifexian recommends that people only use gender distinction in the third person only. However Arabic uses it in both second and third person 7:35 Artifexian advises against using gender distinctions in the plural markers, but Arabic has gendered pronouns in both dual (which he also advised against in 7:55) and plural. 8:29 Artifexian says the number of pronoun cases should not be less than the number of noun cases. However, Arabic has 3 noun cases, 2 of which are used by the same pronoun case group. (Differentiated by whether they are used on a noun or verb)
@@maeentell3259 actually Classical Arabic does not distinguish gender in the dual pronouns! أنتما (/ʔantumaː/) and هما (/humaː/) are used for the masculine and feminine. Also Artifexian never said rules, they said "I advise" or "I recommend against".
I have a conlang where instead of sex or gender, 3rd person pronouns are based on age. There's child pronouns and there's adult pronouns. There's a bunch of social rules associated with when it's okay for whom to refer to who with which pronouns, although a lot of it is similar to the use of formal you. There's also one set of pronouns for animals and one for everything else. It's for the better since they have three sexes and five genders and each individual can have any number of genders, including zero.
One of my current conlang projects has something similar: it's distinction is based on size. You could apply the diminutives and augmentatives in such a way to refer to age but it also covers natural sex (sexual dimorphism), formality (size = power), and race (think halfling vs. human).
Don’t forget the pseudo-pronoun way that the demonstratives こいつ/そいつ/あいつ (koitsu/soitsu/aitsu) which roughly translate to ‘this guy/that guy (that 2nd person mentioned or is with that 2nd person)/ that guy over there (third person away from both speaker and listener) but which are gender neutral, casual, and used a lot where we would use pronouns (especially aitsu in the place of he/she; I hear this a lot when someone wants to express annoyance at the attitude of someone who isn’t ‘here’).
Does Japanese even have pronouns? I mean sure, they have (a lot of) words to refer to themselves, the listener and others. However they are not special in any way, basiacally just normal nouns, unlike e.g. English. They are usually quite long for being a pronoun, changes frequently with newer words being coined and don't have any special rules for use that differs from nouns. Like 手伝ってあげた私 makes sense in Japanese, but you can't say the same in English, "the I that helped you", as pronouns can't be described with relative clauses.
@@BlackM3sh Yes, Japanese does have pronouns. A "pronoun" is simply a word that is used to substitute a noun or noun phrase. Since words like "watashi" don't have any clear meaning outside of context in the same way as "I", it is a pronoun and not a noun.
@@F2p7YshCn9 So what word does 私 (watashi) replace? And if so what makes pronouns any different then replacing any other noun with a more generic noun? Like I can replace the phrase "Japanese citizen" with "person" in any sentence, so is "person" a pronoun?
Basically, pronouns can be adapted to agree with basically anything a language can have. The craziest pronoun system I've ever made agreed with person, gender, count, case and one of 4 emotions, positive, negative, violent and undistinguished. You could have a 1.SG.M.NOM.VIO, so Kyurejha "I am Jha and I'm angry".
Funny idea 😂 Do inanimate things not have emotions? Or are they just always "undistinguished"? Or are the emotions used as metaphor, e.g. violent winter for harsh winter?
@@obviativ123 nice question! Inert objects without what could be perceived as actions or events were often undistinguished. Say, a rock. However, inanimate things that affect us in some way, say a rock that being thrown at us, could be marked with how their actions or events makes us feel. A "raging storm" could be a violent (Rage, outlet) storm or a negative (Sadness, impotence, melancholy) storm. A chair is most often undistinguished, but it can be positive (Cozy, comfortable), or negative (I guess you see what they are lol). Of course they are commonly perceived standards, a bed doesn't feel, a chair doesn't feel, a storm *oftenly* feels negatively, a rock often doesn't feel until we are affected by their presence, in which case it'd feel violence.
i made a 4th person pronoun for my conlang. it is used for people you’ve never met, and is a sign of respect for celebrities, politicians, and historical figures. it’s technically just a 3rd person formal, but it is a whole separate case.
Icelandic has gender distinctions in the third person plural. A group of men is masculine, a group of women is feminine and a group of neuter (like children) is neuter. Mixed groups usually takes the neuter.
@@ppenmudera4687 It's not that Romans preferred males or something, it's just related to how the classes came to be. In PIE the "feminine" was only a subset of animate nouns, so the "masculine" was used for animate nouns in general which hasn't changed much in daughter languages.
I'm curious as to why at around 9:15 you say that your ONLY two options are to have either only independent person markers or both independent and dependent ones. Maybe it's just for convenience's sake, but actually that's not the only option. You can have a system with only dependent markers. Several languages of the Americas do this, and a lot of the words that pop up in dictionaries of those languages as "pronouns" are actually inflected verbs with those languages' dependent person markers attached to them that actually mean essentially "I am the one", "You are the one", etc. or something like that.
I wonder if independent pronouns usually form from such inflected verbs, especially first and second person pronouns. Though I'm sure there are other ways of evolving pronouns.
@@majacovic5141 In the languages I'm thinking of there are person markers that are inseparable from the verbs (and also often predicate nouns and adjectives, which enter the same paradigms as verbs) that take them. Often in dictionaries, especially older ones, of these languages, there will be entries for words labelled "pronouns" that are actually an inflected copula verb with that person marker attached to it, and often it's a form which only appears in contexts where someone is being emphatic or specific about something, like if I said, "I was the one who ate the cake." or "That's you in the photo." An example I like to use is from Lakota and Dakota, there's a copula "e" that is used in exactly those sorts of situations and would also pop out if I was being specific about a non-pronominal actant, such as "It was that dog that ate the cake." There are resources, especially old grammars and such, that will call the inflectional forms "miye", "niye", "uŋkiye" and so on as "pronouns" for "I", "you", and "we" and so on, but actually "miye" is decomposable into 1st person singular inactive person marker "mi" (which cannot stand on its own) + that copula "e", and so it is for all the other forms.
Yeah actually i worked on a conlang where the only pronouns were genitive prefixes that describe a noun as being owned by some person, with the verb agreeing with the person of the subject and object. It was interesting and totally sidesteps the need for independent pronouns
4:00 There's also the royal "we". Cone to think of it, I've heard that in ancient China there was a first person pronoun which could only be used by the sitting emperor. Not much clusivity there!
I think you may be thinking about the pronoun "寡人" for the first person pronoun which could only be used by the sitting emperor. Off to a tangent, that is also meant to be a polite form, as it meant "a person that is not sufficient in morality" or whatever the English phrase is, apologies but I am not good at English.
in Malay language of Southeast Asia, "beta" is the 1st person singular pronoun used by the royal family to address themselves to ordinary folk. ordinary folk must only use "patik" as 1st person singular pronoun to talk to the royal family. kinda interesting in contrast to English that only use "I" regardless of your social class (royal or ordinary people)
One of my early conlangs distinguished between natural and artificial. For example, the distinction between "tree trunk" and "pillar," or "large broad leaf" and "page of a book," was the gender marker. Sex gender was marked in personal pronouns, and could be distinguished in names and other nouns by an clitic, with non-gender describing a category (cat, teacher, cattle), when gender is not specified or not relevant (that hawk, my boss), and occasionally in names as a personal pronoun choice (like "they/them" pronouns in English.)
Yindjibarndi, Western Australia No Gender. Limited Clusivity. Four-fold 3rd Person Obviation: Here, There, Yonder, and Stressed Yonder. 3 Numbers; Singular, Dual Plural across all Persons and Obviations. Generational gap encoded across all Dual and 1st Person Plural forms. 10 Grammatical Cases
I would guess most languages treat the (1+1) option for “we” the same as the (1+3) option because it still doesn’t include any “2”s and you can easily re-analyze the auxiliary members of the speaker’s party as a 3rd party.
Hey Artifexian! Do you think you could make a sequel to this one that covers other kinds of pronouns, like indefinite, demonstrative, reflex, and reciprocal? Words and phrases like “nobody” and “one another” seem pretty important to day-to-day speech, but I have no idea how to go about constructing them.
I hope you would feature Vietnamese pronoun system in your next video. We literally have a ton of them that would often confuse the foreigners and sometime even the natives due to its complexity based on social status and gender. A great example is if someone were to tell me to translate the phrase : "Anh nói em" without any context. Under right conditions, which happens a lot, it can either mean "I told you" or "you told me". This is just one of various other distinct Vietnamese pronouns We also have what we called "True pronouns" which are only used exclusively for friends who had the same age (not age group) as ours or stranger that we do not know how old they are. It is actually quite often that a Vietnamese person would ask you how old are you to address the right pronoun accordingly.
If anyone want more specific information then I can tell you the best I could. Pronoun system is probably the hardest linguistic feature of Vietnamese so I think it would definitely take time and effort for you to understand it let alone getting used to it.I love your videos btw
Great video. I'm working hard on a how-to homesteading book right now, but as soon as I finish that it's back to writing science fiction novels, and these conlang videos are quite useful.
Here’s an ASL pronoun feature I thought was really cool: the first time you referred to someone use their name (spell/name sign) and then point in a certain direction. That direction is now that person‘s pronoun. You can have as many distinct pronouns as you want, easily have a half dozen “he”’s and there’s no problem. Signed language probably have a lot of other language features that are very unique, it would be cool to see them covered here.
Great video to watch, even 2 years later… . I’m working on a conlang breaking nearly every rule… 😅😅😅 . It’s 7 seven genders and 7 seven numbers, all marked in nominative and oblique pronouns, plus 1st and 2nd person clusivity, plus definiteness… . And I’m not even kidding! I’m running out of letters in my artscript to convey this or that distinction… Though it may seem impossible at a first thought and chaotic at a first look, I think I’ve managed to bring together a very elegant, logical and clear system. . But, anyway, that’s just a tiny step in conlanging, and I’ll watch your next video on this subject right away! Thanks a lot for your content!
Finally getting around to this video and I have to say, you are literally the first person I've heard use the term "grok" outside of discussing Stranger in A Strange Land. Love it.
@@dionysianapollomarx Hi! I'm both a Tagalog speaker and a French speaker. It is true that Tagalog is an easy language (if not for the verbs) due to the lack of noun genders, but, I've complained also the same thing in French. Pourquoi est-ce qu'une pomme féminine mais un chocolat est masculin ? Cela veut dire qu'une pomme est une femme et un chocolat est un homme ? The point there was actually not to look them as genders. You can look at them like noun classifications because for some reason, words just flow in those languages better in one of those "classifications". And you just have to deal with them. Although saying « une belle manteau » won't hurt the meaning, it's just that, it does not flow well. That's the part that I can't explain. In Spanish, we can have this incorrect phrase « un bota negro ». There is this sort of agreement that the words of this class goes with the words within its class. If words of different classes come together, it just doesn't flow. TL;DR: The gender's more like a classification system. You can look at them as class A nouns and class B nouns whatsoever. Swedish does not have masculine and feminine anymore, but now classes its nouns as common and neuter
Meron din yung Dual(speaker at addresse) pero sa mga rural speaker(hindi lang Tagalog) lang mahanap yan. Caso ng Tagalog, at ibang wika(urban) , nasimplified ang wika.
@@dionysianapollomarx essentially, latin's neutral words ended up merging with the masculine (as in accusative, the only case that survived, both ended in -um), except for neutral nouns that were mostly used in the plural (-a), which merged with the feminine. so words that were initially neutral were distributed between masculine and feminine for phonetic reasons.
@ThisIsMyRealName When was classism ever defined as simply being unable to afford something? I thought it was treating people as less than simply because of their class. Am I misunderstanding what you're trying to say or something?
@@StunBuns this is similar to the difference between racism and racial prejudice. What you are describing could be an example of classism on the level of an individual interaction. Generally when we discuss classism we are referring to systems of oppression based on class, rather than individuals “being classist”. When trans people are prevented from access to life saving medical treatments, this is a system of classism (as there is a monetary barrier to access which excludes people of a certain class) interacting with a system of sexism (as trans people specifically are hurt by this barrier due to the fact that they are the ones who need these treatments).
I like using the [u] sound for 2nd person pronouns. We have it in English and Spanish and it’s like the speaker is using their lips to point at who they’re talking to
My personal conlang has different pronouns depending on if you're talking about someone in the present, past or future. The implication is that in the far enough past and future, you are effectively a different person. When talking about past-you, for example, it wouldn't make sense to consider that person the same as current you, but it also wouldn't make sense to consider them a third person. For example, if you want to talk about what you did 15 years ago, you usually wouldn't say "I(present) did a thing" because you're not the same person. You'd say "I(past) did a thing". You can still talk about the past using the present pronouns because, after all, you from, say, 5 minutes ago is still pretty much you. But this lets you more easily talk about people in the further past and future without conflating them with themselves in different times. This can also be used to imply certain things about intent. For example, if you say that someones past self did something wanted something, it's not the same as saying that someones present self wanted something. So much potential for passive-aggresiveness!
9:16 That's not a prefix (French doesn't use those at all as you're suggesting here), it's just elision, where the final vowel is dropped in front of a word that begins with a vowel. It would be "te" in front of any verb that doesn't start in a vowel, which is just an oblique case for the 2nd person singular pronoun.
An idea I'm playing with is a few pronouns that inflect from the singular or dual with plural affixes. The 1st person dual is 1+2 or 1+3, which can pluralize to 1+2, plural and 1+3, plural, but 1+2+3 plural is the plural of the 1st singular. The 3rd has a singular masculine and singular feminine, but a dual masculine and feminine, which can each pluralize for just masculine, just feminine, or mixed groups.
5:57 Caribbean Spanish makes a gender distinction for the 1st plural (M= nosotros, F= nosotras) and the third person (M= el, ellos; F= ella, ellas, N= ello) but only in the nominative and dative. Everything else is gender-neutral.
Fun fact: in certain languages that have pronouns *and* suffixes/prefixes, you often miss out several pronouns in a sentence. Polish is an example, since you can usually tell by the form of a verb if it's in the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person, and if it's plural or not, even gender is usually indicated, though not always. If you want to emphasize who you're talking about, then including pronouns is a useful way to do that ("a jak ty się nazywasz?" - "and what are *you* called?") There are exceptions to this. For certain verbs, we'll use the reflexive pronoun się, which is the same no matter who it's referring to. The 3rd person on/ona (oni/one for plurals) *can* be included in a sentence and sound fine, but it isn't necessary. *Possessive* pronouns like "moje", "twoje", and "jego/jej" are included a lot more often because there's no way to indicate possession with the form of the noun. There's also "to", which means "it", although it can also mean "this", as in "this is [...]" or "look at this" (*not* as in "this person" or "this thing"). Aside from those exceptions, though, using too many pronouns in Polish is kind of like not using any contractions in English - you either come off as too formal, or as someone who's only just starting to learn the language.
You missed the neuter for singular. "To" doesn't really mean "it". Look: The pronouns are: --- on, ona, ono (he, she, it). And the demonstratives are: --- ten, ta, to (this, this, this - masc./fem./neut.) In Polish, the pronouns - as opposed to English - are NOT personal, since all nouns have gender. So a car is a "he", unlike in English. But because we use the 3rd person pronoun "ono" predominantly for people and animals, then as the third person pronoun for things we instead use the demonstrative "to".
I don't think the gender distinction in the first and second persons are rare because the gender is known but rather because it's irrelevant. I think the main goal of gender pronouns is to reduce ambiguity on who we are talking about. If we're talking about Kate and Tom, then "they (sing.)" could be either Kate or Tom, whereas he and she resolves the ambiguity. Regarding first and second person most of the time there's a single person who could be the singular "I" and a single person who could be the singular "you" so there's really nearly no need for disambiguating.
(5:45) Why does so many dots missing in Europe? There's probably plenty of dots missing elsewhere too. I'm confused over how I'm supposed to read this map.
It’s a WALS map. Obviously they aren’t gonna have literally every single language in the survey, so they take a sample, and so places where linguistic diversity is high like Papua New Guinea or the Caucasus have many dots and vice versa.
That point in the video was not about singular vs plural, it was about two distinct plurals, one referring only to the listeners, one referring to both the listeners and someone else.
Artifexian:"I recommend avoiding gender distinctions in plural forms" Me: *Laughs in French* Also Artifexian: *Puts "Je t'aime" as an example* Me: *Angry French noises*
What's your source on Barai having a merger of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person pronouns? And Koiari having a 1st / 3rd merger? I can't seem to find that anywhere, and I'm interested in learning more, because it might relate to my research
Oh my god, thank you for the proximate/obviate distinction, because I put one of those in a conlang but had no idea what it was called. I drew the later distinctions not by distance, but by relationship to the action of the third person speaker, and I'm not sure if that has a special name. Singular, gender-neutral, uninflected pronouns, 1, 2, 3prox, 3obv1(4), 3obv2(5): Yo, a, ye, yij, yin. "Stam nya hye an yij tsozamn tyin Dreugunzdon ka. (Amnulzhun.)" "He spoke to him while he was at Dragonstone." [Impf.continuant SPEAK topic.3s TO 4s SIMULTANEOUS locative.5s DRAGONSTONE cop. ("All parties identify as male.")] I do most of my conlangs stream-of-consciousness, by speaking in trances and finding patterns and repeating sentences until they flow right, which means I don't usually know the technical terms for how they work, so I'm so happy this has a name (whether or not any natlangs do it).
Mandarin has three 3rd person pronouns, 他, 她, and 它. 他 is masculine/neuter, 她 is feminine, and 它 is used for non-humans, kinda like English “it.” But here’s the kicker: all three characters are pronounced “tā.” The distinction among them only exists in writing. As a result, Mandarin-speakers who learn other languages frequently use the wrong pronouns when speaking.
I love your beret. You make it look good. Thank you for the awesome videos too. :) So, in Japanese, when they say (name)-San or (name)-kun or (name)-chan or (name)-sama, Is that an example of a personal marker in the 3rd person denoting class?
Those are called honorifics and have nothing to do with pronouns. English also has honorifics, but tends to put them before names. Examples of names decorated with honorifics in English: Mrs. Whyte Dr. Xanders Officer Yang Father Gershom
one of my heritage languages is one of those rare languages you mention at 6:17 only first and second person singular pronouns mark gender, third person and all plural pronouns don't but I is adx [aⁿdʲ] and you is idx [iⁿdʲ] if you are male, but ũ'kwe [ũʔkwe] and i'kwe [iʔkwe] if you are female
on the podcast lexicon Vally, Dr. McWhorter mentioned how english is odd with its lack of clear number in pronouns. No 2nd person plural, and with the rise of singular they the language only has a plural 1st person pronoun, if singular they takes over
6:22 "The genders of the speaker and addressee are usually self-evident. The gender of the third person, the party being talked about, isn't always." What if, like, there is a fictional culture where it is considered extremely rude to talk about the addresse's gender? Like, even mentioning it suggests you want to have sex with that person because why else would the gender be important to mention? Would such a culture justify the existence of a gender in the first person but not in the second person? Does such a culture exists? If not, I would like to know if you know anything about the reasons for some of those exceptions to your 3>2>1 suggestion you mentioned.
Spanish isn’t actually pro-drop, but null-subject. Pro-drop languages drop pronouns in all environments, Romance languages only drop pronouns when that pronoun is the subject, with clitics being largely required. A better example of a pro-drop language would be Japanese (which may not even have pronouns at all, depending on who you ask). Japanese (and a number of pro-drop languages) also doesn’t have person marking on verbs, either relying on context or actively stating the noun in question (generally, someone’s name).
You're not reeeally wrong but definitions of pro-drop and null-subject a little off though :P Pro-drop languages are those which allows certain classes of pronouns to be dropped when they're explicit by grammar (like verb conjugations) or context, like how in portuguese you can say "gostei" (lit. "(I) liked (it)") ommiting both subject and object pronouns Null-subject is when you can omit the subject, as in "I see you" being translated to "te veo" in spanish, ommiting the subject (Yo) A null-subject language is when you can ommit subjects, a pro-drop language is when you can drop certain pronouns, making every null-subject language also a pro-drop language (but not all pro-drop are null-subject) :P
They can come from determiners, locative markers, verbs of existence (to-be) as is the case with Hoocąk, relative pronouns, or third person pronouns. We know relatively little on common trends of their origin, and we're only just starting to piece it together.
In Hebrew, we mark both number and gender on *2nd person pronouns*. We have a singular masculine "you" (ata), singular feminine "you" (at), plural masculine "you" (atem) and plural feminine "you" (aten). While the distinguishing between singular masculine and feminine, though needless, isn't really a problem, the distinguishing between plural masculine and feminine only causes problems and arguments over the question - When addressing a mixed group, what pronoun should we use? Masculine or feminine? But thankfully, the feminine plural 2nd person pronoun has been dying out, and in everyday speech, more and more people just use the masculine plural to refer to both males and females (even when they talk only about a plurality of females).
Can I make my own distinctions? Like, not gender, not plural, but time? I've making a conlang where you'd need to change the pronoun depending on the time. This is justified as "there was a time marker, that was always after pronoun, but after time, they murged together, and now it is not a pronoun, but rather person time marker" Would that be ok? Also, I made a singular-dual-plural model, but What If I change the meaning of dual to "groupal", so that you mean that some people, or some items, are in a group? Like, word people used to just indicate crowd, but then became plural form of "person". Are such things realistic?
I don't know what to call it but because spirits and deities are factual in my world the conlang I've made for it has a a form to address those attributes as well. So when they speak they can distinguish between their physical body that is their current incarnation as well as the animating life force as separate if they really wanted to. And likewise they could speak of the Christian Trinity without being as confused (linguistically at least) since the language promotes thinking in terms that says that there is a Physical being that is inhabited by a Spiritual being which does or doesn't have a Divine essence within it.
A few people have pointed this out. I'm not getting an artifacts on my end. Are you watching with a slow internet connection? Are you watching in HD/4K?
my internet connection cannot handle anything over 1080p I didn't mean to insult your content or how it was made, since the compression is on youtube's end: my only advice would be to not use very dark colours if you must use solid-colour backgrounds (see Tom Scott's video on why if you must ua-cam.com/video/h9j89L8eQQk/v-deo.html)
@@slaughterround643 or just download it with winX deluxe its like me whos opposite torrent streaming instead of download cuz I dont want the trace in my space yeh its hard to find p2p vpn so downloading is a better choice for slow stuff just like spending hours or days on ur fav game download
i love the use of "American" to refer to the indigenous people here and not having it be clarified. I know that probably wasn't conscious but Americans have a (bad) tendency to treat indigenous languages as if they used to be around but are not anymore
I suppose there isn't any American language or European languages from America so there's no real need for a distinction. English, Spanish, Portuguese, French etc spoken in America are still the same European languages. Might get more complicated if you had a distinct American language derived from English for the US. But it's always good to have America refer to more than just the country.
I had an idea. A species with two heads that think independently. -a separate pronoun person referring to the other head, like a 1.5th person -a separate pronoun number for referring to both heads at once
I don't have much knowledge to contribute here, but I'd just like to extend my thanks to Artifexian and especially all the commenters here that inject so much fascinating linguistic knowledge into my life. It's stupendously nerdy and it affirms my interest in language and culture.
in a natural language that I speak, we have three third person markers for "this he", "that he", and "yonder he" and so for different genders and numbers
I’m a bit confused with the we For (1,2) does does that involve plural or singular you? Cause for my native language We have Tada (1,2,3) Kami (1,3) Ta (1,2) However if I am speaking with 2 or more people I have to use tada Which would this belong to?
Not exactly. The meaning and usage of a fourth person varies depending on the individual language in question. It could be an indefinite person, it could be a hypothetical person, it could be impersonal, it could be an obviative (distinguishing one third person from a different third person). It just depends on the language, but ultimately, it is still just a different distinction of the third person.
@@jannovotny4797 There were some inaccuracies in how he explained 3P pronouns for non-binary people, basically taking a Eurocentric view that such pronouns had to be the result of a cultural shift to recognize non-binary people, while they are some Native American languages and cultures that have historically recognized non-binary people and had it encoded in the language for a long time. Also, he took a pretty narrow view of what non-binary means, since anthropologically, the current system among liberal westerners is not the only way to have non-binary distinctions.
@@LangThoughts Do you know which native american cultures did? It would be interesting to read on that and my knowledge about precolombian cultures is not enough to even start the research by myself.
I mean, sex is sometimes self-evident. Not so much for gender though, since that's an internal thing. Therefore, there is absolutely a need for person-marking in the first person, & not in the 2nd or 3rd. You can only KNOW your own gender, & only ASSUME someone elses. Marking gender on the 2nd or 3rd person is very assumptive.
Is it possible to have independent prox-obv pronouns? If so, could possessive pronouns be unmarked for obviation? Can a language have prox-obv on top of a gender distinction?
How do dependant markers evolve in natural languages? Do these pronoun suffixes simply appear ex nihilo or do they come from an underlying historical VSO word where the subject later becomes agglutinated to the verb?
And related question: why they diverge so much even within one language. Hungarian has both -m and -k for "I", -l, -d and -sz for singular "you", -uk and -unk for "we" etc.
Unrelated but my proclivity for listening to voices and words really kicks in whenever I watch your videos... I know it's odd but man I love that Irish ending "T", I do not know why 😆😅
I believe most Semitic languages (Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic...) not only have gender distinctions in the sing. 2nd person, but also in the pl. 2nd & 3rd. So, I mean, not THAT rare
I'm not claiming any language do that or anyone should try it in a conlang, but THEORETICALLY, you could go really nuts with "WE" (first person plural). Besides classes and multiple numbers (dual, trial etc.), you could make a series of arrangements of who is we in each person: 1st: a) me and only me; b) me and these guys I represent (like in a team, which would count as 3rd person in English) + 2nd: a) you and only you; b) you all (multiple adressees); c) you, but not you (multiple adressees); d) not you + / or 3rd: a) no other person; b) those other guys; c) everybody As I said: that is just theoretically.
I'd like to be a little stickler and say that its not always people. Objects are often given pronounts its just they aren't as often analysed as pronouns. Classic case - "it" is an object pronoun (singular) and those/that/this can all be used like pronouns at least some of the time (even if they are defined as demonstratives). Also its worth being mentioned that pronouns in Sign Languages are often handled in interesting ways. For BSL and ASL at least (the SLs I have varying amounts of knowledge of) tend to use indexing and related concepts for pronouns, indexing being the practise of using the index finger to point at the relevant object. While there is the option to mouth "I/you/he/she/it" the singular prounouns are handled by pointing an index finger at the relevant thing either in real space, or in signspace (signspace being the space in which you sign). This marks for literal physical location (aka left, right, forward, back, up down) and in BSL heirarchical place and/or literal size (for instance Mother(slight up), sister (same level), daughter(slight below)). Multiples can be signed in BSL using the relevant number of fingers and passed between the number of people, which can mark for clusivity. If I want to say me and a friend (we) but not you I would just sign with two fingers pointing up and passing between me and the friend (either where they literally are or where I have placed them in the hypothetical sign space).
also side note while gender systems are based off sex in many cultures, gendered pronouns are technically based off those gender systems not based off the biological sex but thats like a *hyper nitpick*
@@valkeakirahvi Oh thanks for saying! iirc Finnish Sign Language is part of the Swedish Sign Language family which is hypothesised to be part of the Old-BSL family. So this might be because the two are distantly related or because of sign symbology in sign linguistics (i.e. the tendancy for sign languages to be very representative of the outside world with symbols and for the pointing hand to usually represent the symbol for "that thing/person) I'd love to find a SL that does this completely differently tho
There aren’t many that specifically expand over general language rules in multiple languages, but there are plenty that focus on specific areas of grammar across many languages. There are also Grammars which go in depth on the whole of a specific language. Rarely a grammar will cover a language family rather than a single language, but they tend to be closely related. Anyways for books focusing on specific areas of grammar across languages: Antipassive: Typology, Diachrony, and Related Constructions focuses specifically on antipassive constructions. Subordination in Native South American Languages does the same for subordination constructions specifically in South America. Some books that cover a wider range of grammar and language structure but for specific languages are A Grammar of Cavineña by Antoine Guillaume, Nivaclé Grammar by Lyle Campbell, and A Grammar of Aguaruna by Simon Overall. Honestly I recommend starting online and finding papers, then getting grammars of languages that interest you or have features that interest you, and keep expanding from there as you find new features and languages. Many grammars are available online, like the grammar of Enxet Sur. Getting books for specific features may be more worth it if you start getting a special interest in that feature unless you can find the book online, get it for cheap, or get it through a library (check if your library offers Worldcat). There’s usually plenty of information accessible online for specific features. I always love getting grammars though if the language or its features are of interest to me, just check if it’s online first.
in my conlang, the pronouns are chosen almost like a name, there are some loose rules for what a pronoun can be (basically any stop sound followed by a vowel) with some being more socially acceptable than others. this also means there is no 1st, 2nd or 3rd person, its all just whatever the persons chosen pronoun is
Artifexian, I wonder how you would design an alien world with other ways of communicating rather than verbally. I wonder how you would create an alien species that communicated through body language or by pheromones.
Would still be third person yes, but a cool category to mark nonetheless. Nivaclé has seperate kinship terms for dead relatives, so something similar for pronouns would be cool
Finnish has a sort of 0th person, which is usually used with passive voice and doesn’t really refer to anyone in particular, mostly just an action in general that could be possibly committed. I think it’s mostly used in negative form as well.
I'm pretty sure this is still a 3rd person. If it's used for non-speakers, non-addressee then it's a 3rd person. The English 'one' for example is still a third person.
@@Artifexian I am not sure as i am not linguist, but for example in Suomi ("finnish") the passive is like: "Talossa työskennellään." translates as "people work in the house. Talo (house) -ssa (inside) työskennellä (to work) and the form työskennellään is passive form. In modern speechs that form is often used for 1. person plural form, but it can still be used as passive form.
Old English and Old High German had Dual also in first and second person. wit in German and with in English which now means with/mit in English. and git in German and gith in English for you both.
I might be wrong, but I think there are some languages that have only dependant person markers and not independant ones. I know there are languages where the independant forms are impractically long and ones where they are not allowed to be used as subjects.
8:23 Wait a second, I thought that the word ending 's marks the genitive case in English, but it is said in the video that English doesn't have any cases for nouns. Can someone clear this up to me, please?
English has almost completely lost case. It is only shown in pronouns and the genitive market for nouns as well. I would also like to mention gender which has almost disappeared too but still exists in 3rd person pronouns and some French loanwords ex I, me, my shows 1st person in different cases he, she, it, they 3rd person singular in 4 different genders fiancé and fiancée is the only word that I can think of that is regularly changed for gender marking Hope this helped!
I'm thinking to create a pronoun system like this 1, 2, 3, 1+2, 1+3, 2+3, 1+2+3 with each case having singular dual and plural so that makes it into 21 pronouns haven't thought much about if it will have cases like genetive and nominative but idk if that's practical to have
just have 3 pronouns (3rd person singular/plural, 2nd person singular, 2nd person plural) and have the two first person pronouns be a modification of your 2nd person pronouns.
I really hoped you would explain paucal for example. But now I have to look it up anyway, after hearing it so many times and not knowing what it's supposed to be.
How do dependent suffixes get suffixed though? I know it'd make sense for the pronoun to glue to end of the verb if it was in an VS order, like what happened in spanish "soy" and "estoy", but isn't the VS order quite uncommon? How could it end up being the main way of inflecting verbs in Latin and Proto-germanic (and I think in PIE too)? Also, do dependents always come from the independent pronouns?
I like how classical Arabic breaks every rule Artifexian put
No it doesn't! Enlighten us!
@@fenugreekqueen6805
3:37 First-person markers have more number distinctions than second, and second more than third. However, in Classical Arabic, the first person only has 2 (singular and plural) while the second and third have 3, (singular, dual, and plural)
6:15 Artifexian recommends that people only use gender distinction in the third person only. However Arabic uses it in both second and third person
7:35 Artifexian advises against using gender distinctions in the plural markers, but Arabic has gendered pronouns in both dual (which he also advised against in 7:55) and plural.
8:29 Artifexian says the number of pronoun cases should not be less than the number of noun cases. However, Arabic has 3 noun cases, 2 of which are used by the same pronoun case group. (Differentiated by whether they are used on a noun or verb)
@@maeentell3259 To quote a certain pirate, “They’re more like guidelines.”
@@GuiSmith i don't think classical arabic was a big fan of the guidelines
@@maeentell3259 actually Classical Arabic does not distinguish gender in the dual pronouns! أنتما (/ʔantumaː/) and هما (/humaː/) are used for the masculine and feminine.
Also Artifexian never said rules, they said "I advise" or "I recommend against".
Me: 11pm, time to go to bed.
UA-cam: how to create your own ponouns in your own language?
Me: very good point!
Brain:congrats you wrote 128 pronouns!
Me: too many. Im restarting
Lmao it’s 10:59 pm for me rn
I have a conlang where instead of sex or gender, 3rd person pronouns are based on age. There's child pronouns and there's adult pronouns. There's a bunch of social rules associated with when it's okay for whom to refer to who with which pronouns, although a lot of it is similar to the use of formal you. There's also one set of pronouns for animals and one for everything else. It's for the better since they have three sexes and five genders and each individual can have any number of genders, including zero.
Do those social rules include using the 'wrong' pronoun as an insult? I.e. using the child pronoun when speaking to an adult.
One of my current conlang projects has something similar: it's distinction is based on size. You could apply the diminutives and augmentatives in such a way to refer to age but it also covers natural sex (sexual dimorphism), formality (size = power), and race (think halfling vs. human).
D: I also have a conlang with an age thing. But it's more like a noun class system than pronouns specifically.
The pronouns based on age concept is exactly what Vietnamese does, although they include gender as well.
@@HamTransitHistory ngl the ‘wrong’ part makes it seem as though you mispronoun people on purpose
Gonna go as crazy as Japanese: way too many pronouns that can all be dropped most of the time due to context and unclear gender distinctions.
Yeah, I was thinking of:
watashi, boku, ore, jibun, uchi, atashi, ware, watakushi, etc (all can be used as "I")
Don’t forget the pseudo-pronoun way that the demonstratives こいつ/そいつ/あいつ (koitsu/soitsu/aitsu) which roughly translate to ‘this guy/that guy (that 2nd person mentioned or is with that 2nd person)/ that guy over there (third person away from both speaker and listener) but which are gender neutral, casual, and used a lot where we would use pronouns (especially aitsu in the place of he/she; I hear this a lot when someone wants to express annoyance at the attitude of someone who isn’t ‘here’).
Does Japanese even have pronouns? I mean sure, they have (a lot of) words to refer to themselves, the listener and others. However they are not special in any way, basiacally just normal nouns, unlike e.g. English. They are usually quite long for being a pronoun, changes frequently with newer words being coined and don't have any special rules for use that differs from nouns. Like 手伝ってあげた私 makes sense in Japanese, but you can't say the same in English, "the I that helped you", as pronouns can't be described with relative clauses.
@@BlackM3sh Yes, Japanese does have pronouns. A "pronoun" is simply a word that is used to substitute a noun or noun phrase. Since words like "watashi" don't have any clear meaning outside of context in the same way as "I", it is a pronoun and not a noun.
@@F2p7YshCn9 So what word does 私 (watashi) replace? And if so what makes pronouns any different then replacing any other noun with a more generic noun? Like I can replace the phrase "Japanese citizen" with "person" in any sentence, so is "person" a pronoun?
Basically, pronouns can be adapted to agree with basically anything a language can have. The craziest pronoun system I've ever made agreed with person, gender, count, case and one of 4 emotions, positive, negative, violent and undistinguished. You could have a 1.SG.M.NOM.VIO, so Kyurejha "I am Jha and I'm angry".
Funny idea 😂
Do inanimate things not have emotions? Or are they just always "undistinguished"? Or are the emotions used as metaphor, e.g. violent winter for harsh winter?
@@obviativ123 nice question! Inert objects without what could be perceived as actions or events were often undistinguished. Say, a rock. However, inanimate things that affect us in some way, say a rock that being thrown at us, could be marked with how their actions or events makes us feel. A "raging storm" could be a violent (Rage, outlet) storm or a negative (Sadness, impotence, melancholy) storm. A chair is most often undistinguished, but it can be positive (Cozy, comfortable), or negative (I guess you see what they are lol). Of course they are commonly perceived standards, a bed doesn't feel, a chair doesn't feel, a storm *oftenly* feels negatively, a rock often doesn't feel until we are affected by their presence, in which case it'd feel violence.
@@sabikikasuko6636 Interesting! I also like the grammatical prefixes in Kyure-jha - I use often prefixes and suffixes at the same time 😀
@@sabikikasuko6636 Lol. "Angry rocks" = thrown rocks.
i made a 4th person pronoun for my conlang. it is used for people you’ve never met, and is a sign of respect for celebrities, politicians, and historical figures. it’s technically just a 3rd person formal, but it is a whole separate case.
ooh i love that so much
interesting concept
Icelandic has gender distinctions in the third person plural. A group of men is masculine, a group of women is feminine and a group of neuter (like children) is neuter.
Mixed groups usually takes the neuter.
Damn,, I thought I was unquie for having that in my conlang
@@emilandreasson9670 Nah, spme natlangs have it too. French for example has 'ils' for 2 or more men and 'elles' for 2 or more females.
@@ppenmudera4687, of course, a group of females with one male in the room is still referred to as "ils" though.
@@Ggdivhjkjl yeah, gotta love that classic Roman male preference that driped into Latins daughters
@@ppenmudera4687 It's not that Romans preferred males or something, it's just related to how the classes came to be. In PIE the "feminine" was only a subset of animate nouns, so the "masculine" was used for animate nouns in general which hasn't changed much in daughter languages.
I'm curious as to why at around 9:15 you say that your ONLY two options are to have either only independent person markers or both independent and dependent ones. Maybe it's just for convenience's sake, but actually that's not the only option. You can have a system with only dependent markers. Several languages of the Americas do this, and a lot of the words that pop up in dictionaries of those languages as "pronouns" are actually inflected verbs with those languages' dependent person markers attached to them that actually mean essentially "I am the one", "You are the one", etc. or something like that.
I wonder if independent pronouns usually form from such inflected verbs, especially first and second person pronouns. Though I'm sure there are other ways of evolving pronouns.
so, instead of I, you, he/she/it; its am, are, is?
@@majacovic5141 In the languages I'm thinking of there are person markers that are inseparable from the verbs (and also often predicate nouns and adjectives, which enter the same paradigms as verbs) that take them. Often in dictionaries, especially older ones, of these languages, there will be entries for words labelled "pronouns" that are actually an inflected copula verb with that person marker attached to it, and often it's a form which only appears in contexts where someone is being emphatic or specific about something, like if I said, "I was the one who ate the cake." or "That's you in the photo." An example I like to use is from Lakota and Dakota, there's a copula "e" that is used in exactly those sorts of situations and would also pop out if I was being specific about a non-pronominal actant, such as "It was that dog that ate the cake." There are resources, especially old grammars and such, that will call the inflectional forms "miye", "niye", "uŋkiye" and so on as "pronouns" for "I", "you", and "we" and so on, but actually "miye" is decomposable into 1st person singular inactive person marker "mi" (which cannot stand on its own) + that copula "e", and so it is for all the other forms.
@@reinatheomni-panda7028 ah. i think i get it. thanks
Yeah actually i worked on a conlang where the only pronouns were genitive prefixes that describe a noun as being owned by some person, with the verb agreeing with the person of the subject and object. It was interesting and totally sidesteps the need for independent pronouns
4:00 There's also the royal "we". Cone to think of it, I've heard that in ancient China there was a first person pronoun which could only be used by the sitting emperor. Not much clusivity there!
*Come
I think you may be thinking about the pronoun "寡人" for the first person pronoun which could only be used by the sitting emperor.
Off to a tangent, that is also meant to be a polite form, as it meant "a person that is not sufficient in morality" or whatever the English phrase is, apologies but I am not good at English.
As far as I know, there's also the more Classical 朕(Zhèn/Zahm)
in Malay language of Southeast Asia, "beta" is the 1st person singular pronoun used by the royal family to address themselves to ordinary folk. ordinary folk must only use "patik" as 1st person singular pronoun to talk to the royal family. kinda interesting in contrast to English that only use "I" regardless of your social class (royal or ordinary people)
Is this similar to the honorific speech used in Pohnpeian?
(4:00) I like that you actually cover all three. So often people only think of the clusivity of the second person and forget about the third person.
I noticed that use of "Grok"
You clocked that use of grok?
@@yerdasellsavon9232 The second half of that book was written by drugs
One of my early conlangs distinguished between natural and artificial. For example, the distinction between "tree trunk" and "pillar," or "large broad leaf" and "page of a book," was the gender marker. Sex gender was marked in personal pronouns, and could be distinguished in names and other nouns by an clitic, with non-gender describing a category (cat, teacher, cattle), when gender is not specified or not relevant (that hawk, my boss), and occasionally in names as a personal pronoun choice (like "they/them" pronouns in English.)
Yindjibarndi, Western Australia
No Gender.
Limited Clusivity.
Four-fold 3rd Person Obviation: Here, There, Yonder, and Stressed Yonder.
3 Numbers; Singular, Dual Plural across all Persons and Obviations.
Generational gap encoded across all Dual and 1st Person Plural forms.
10 Grammatical Cases
Australian Aboriginal grammar is beautiful
@@jacksonp2397 And if you want more Australian Aboriginal grammar I would recommend my own Wordpress blog which is called Languages with Wilf.
I would guess most languages treat the (1+1) option for “we” the same as the (1+3) option because it still doesn’t include any “2”s and you can easily re-analyze the auxiliary members of the speaker’s party as a 3rd party.
Hey Artifexian! Do you think you could make a sequel to this one that covers other kinds of pronouns, like indefinite, demonstrative, reflex, and reciprocal? Words and phrases like “nobody” and “one another” seem pretty important to day-to-day speech, but I have no idea how to go about constructing them.
I hope you would feature Vietnamese pronoun system in your next video. We literally have a ton of them that would often confuse the foreigners and sometime even the natives due to its complexity based on social status and gender. A great example is if someone were to tell me to translate the phrase : "Anh nói em" without any context. Under right conditions, which happens a lot, it can either mean "I told you" or "you told me". This is just one of various other distinct Vietnamese pronouns
We also have what we called "True pronouns" which are only used exclusively for friends who had the same age (not age group) as ours or stranger that we do not know how old they are. It is actually quite often that a Vietnamese person would ask you how old are you to address the right pronoun accordingly.
If anyone want more specific information then I can tell you the best I could. Pronoun system is probably the hardest linguistic feature of Vietnamese so I think it would definitely take time and effort for you to understand it let alone getting used to it.I love your videos btw
the video i needed, thanks a lot! great birthday present
happy birthday
@@awkwardperson_yt8765 Thanks!
@@PlanetESPYREX you're welcome
@@PlanetESPYREXhappy birthday
Great video. I'm working hard on a how-to homesteading book right now, but as soon as I finish that it's back to writing science fiction novels, and these conlang videos are quite useful.
There is literally nothing I needed more than this right now. Thank you very much.
Here’s an ASL pronoun feature I thought was really cool: the first time you referred to someone use their name (spell/name sign) and then point in a certain direction. That direction is now that person‘s pronoun. You can have as many distinct pronouns as you want, easily have a half dozen “he”’s and there’s no problem.
Signed language probably have a lot of other language features that are very unique, it would be cool to see them covered here.
Is are closer directions more closely associated as people? Like would a couple have similar directions?
Great video to watch, even 2 years later…
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I’m working on a conlang breaking nearly every rule… 😅😅😅
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It’s 7 seven genders and 7 seven numbers, all marked in nominative and oblique pronouns, plus 1st and 2nd person clusivity, plus definiteness…
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And I’m not even kidding! I’m running out of letters in my artscript to convey this or that distinction… Though it may seem impossible at a first thought and chaotic at a first look, I think I’ve managed to bring together a very elegant, logical and clear system.
.
But, anyway, that’s just a tiny step in conlanging, and I’ll watch your next video on this subject right away! Thanks a lot for your content!
Finally getting around to this video and I have to say, you are literally the first person I've heard use the term "grok" outside of discussing Stranger in A Strange Land. Love it.
Hah! He's the *first person* to do that is he
"English doesn't have any noun cases"
*Sad genetive noises*
Tagalog pronouns have inclusive and exclusive "we" and no gender. Personally, just the right balance 😉
It's what I love about Tagalog. Skips the complications unlike Indo-European languages. Why does an inanimate object have a gender in French?
@@dionysianapollomarx Hi! I'm both a Tagalog speaker and a French speaker.
It is true that Tagalog is an easy language (if not for the verbs) due to the lack of noun genders, but, I've complained also the same thing in French. Pourquoi est-ce qu'une pomme féminine mais un chocolat est masculin ? Cela veut dire qu'une pomme est une femme et un chocolat est un homme ?
The point there was actually not to look them as genders. You can look at them like noun classifications because for some reason, words just flow in those languages better in one of those "classifications". And you just have to deal with them.
Although saying « une belle manteau » won't hurt the meaning, it's just that, it does not flow well. That's the part that I can't explain. In Spanish, we can have this incorrect phrase « un bota negro ». There is this sort of agreement that the words of this class goes with the words within its class. If words of different classes come together, it just doesn't flow.
TL;DR: The gender's more like a classification system. You can look at them as class A nouns and class B nouns whatsoever. Swedish does not have masculine and feminine anymore, but now classes its nouns as common and neuter
The map at 5:48 is wrong
Meron din yung Dual(speaker at addresse) pero sa mga rural speaker(hindi lang Tagalog) lang mahanap yan. Caso ng Tagalog, at ibang wika(urban) , nasimplified ang wika.
@@dionysianapollomarx essentially, latin's neutral words ended up merging with the masculine (as in accusative, the only case that survived, both ended in -um), except for neutral nouns that were mostly used in the plural (-a), which merged with the feminine. so words that were initially neutral were distributed between masculine and feminine for phonetic reasons.
this is a fantastic video and very clearly explains such somewhat complex aspects of grammar, love it and keep up the great work man!
He's back!
Since when has 3 weeks been considered a long time away
@@QuarioQuario54321 I think PrinterPaper101 meant the 'proper' videos, not the 'world lang review... thing' he did the past few months
"Gender also interacts with class," lol.
@ThisIsMyRealName When was classism ever defined as simply being unable to afford something? I thought it was treating people as less than simply because of their class. Am I misunderstanding what you're trying to say or something?
@@StunBuns classism is a host of issues including but not limited to this and the things they were talking about as well
@@StunBuns classism can also be about access. If people in the working class have difficulty accessing healthcare, that is classism.
Man I love how different the internet is now compared to even just 5 years ago
@@StunBuns this is similar to the difference between racism and racial prejudice. What you are describing could be an example of classism on the level of an individual interaction. Generally when we discuss classism we are referring to systems of oppression based on class, rather than individuals “being classist”. When trans people are prevented from access to life saving medical treatments, this is a system of classism (as there is a monetary barrier to access which excludes people of a certain class) interacting with a system of sexism (as trans people specifically are hurt by this barrier due to the fact that they are the ones who need these treatments).
I like using the [u] sound for 2nd person pronouns. We have it in English and Spanish and it’s like the speaker is using their lips to point at who they’re talking to
Yessss! Ive been waiting for aaaages!!!!
Fun fact: in the past, “it” was used as a neuter pronoun for people, as opposed to singular “they” which first appeared in writing in 1375.
My personal conlang has different pronouns depending on if you're talking about someone in the present, past or future. The implication is that in the far enough past and future, you are effectively a different person. When talking about past-you, for example, it wouldn't make sense to consider that person the same as current you, but it also wouldn't make sense to consider them a third person.
For example, if you want to talk about what you did 15 years ago, you usually wouldn't say "I(present) did a thing" because you're not the same person. You'd say "I(past) did a thing".
You can still talk about the past using the present pronouns because, after all, you from, say, 5 minutes ago is still pretty much you. But this lets you more easily talk about people in the further past and future without conflating them with themselves in different times.
This can also be used to imply certain things about intent. For example, if you say that someones past self did something wanted something, it's not the same as saying that someones present self wanted something. So much potential for passive-aggresiveness!
Pretty neat! Do you also use other strategies to mark tempus?
9:16 That's not a prefix (French doesn't use those at all as you're suggesting here), it's just elision, where the final vowel is dropped in front of a word that begins with a vowel. It would be "te" in front of any verb that doesn't start in a vowel, which is just an oblique case for the 2nd person singular pronoun.
He said clitic, because that's what it is.
An idea I'm playing with is a few pronouns that inflect from the singular or dual with plural affixes. The 1st person dual is 1+2 or 1+3, which can pluralize to 1+2, plural and 1+3, plural, but 1+2+3 plural is the plural of the 1st singular. The 3rd has a singular masculine and singular feminine, but a dual masculine and feminine, which can each pluralize for just masculine, just feminine, or mixed groups.
I was literally watching your old conlang video, while I got the notification.
Weird, you mention singular they in the video but you don't include it in the chart at 8:25
5:57
Caribbean Spanish makes a gender distinction for the 1st plural (M= nosotros, F= nosotras) and the third person (M= el, ellos; F= ella, ellas, N= ello) but only in the nominative and dative. Everything else is gender-neutral.
Fun fact: in certain languages that have pronouns *and* suffixes/prefixes, you often miss out several pronouns in a sentence.
Polish is an example, since you can usually tell by the form of a verb if it's in the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person, and if it's plural or not, even gender is usually indicated, though not always. If you want to emphasize who you're talking about, then including pronouns is a useful way to do that ("a jak ty się nazywasz?" - "and what are *you* called?")
There are exceptions to this. For certain verbs, we'll use the reflexive pronoun się, which is the same no matter who it's referring to. The 3rd person on/ona (oni/one for plurals) *can* be included in a sentence and sound fine, but it isn't necessary. *Possessive* pronouns like "moje", "twoje", and "jego/jej" are included a lot more often because there's no way to indicate possession with the form of the noun. There's also "to", which means "it", although it can also mean "this", as in "this is [...]" or "look at this" (*not* as in "this person" or "this thing").
Aside from those exceptions, though, using too many pronouns in Polish is kind of like not using any contractions in English - you either come off as too formal, or as someone who's only just starting to learn the language.
You missed the neuter for singular. "To" doesn't really mean "it". Look:
The pronouns are:
--- on, ona, ono (he, she, it).
And the demonstratives are:
--- ten, ta, to (this, this, this - masc./fem./neut.)
In Polish, the pronouns - as opposed to English - are NOT personal, since all nouns have gender. So a car is a "he", unlike in English. But because we use the 3rd person pronoun "ono" predominantly for people and animals, then as the third person pronoun for things we instead use the demonstrative "to".
Why did I actually get so excited and giggly when I saw the video was up. Guess I'm a linguist fanatic.
I don't think the gender distinction in the first and second persons are rare because the gender is known but rather because it's irrelevant. I think the main goal of gender pronouns is to reduce ambiguity on who we are talking about. If we're talking about Kate and Tom, then "they (sing.)" could be either Kate or Tom, whereas he and she resolves the ambiguity. Regarding first and second person most of the time there's a single person who could be the singular "I" and a single person who could be the singular "you" so there's really nearly no need for disambiguating.
Do you have a video/plan on making one addressing possessive pronouns?
(5:45) Why does so many dots missing in Europe? There's probably plenty of dots missing elsewhere too. I'm confused over how I'm supposed to read this map.
It’s a WALS map. Obviously they aren’t gonna have literally every single language in the survey, so they take a sample, and so places where linguistic diversity is high like Papua New Guinea or the Caucasus have many dots and vice versa.
WELCOME BACK BABY!!
5:25 we kinda have this in some parts of Britain ("you" / "youse" distinction - "you" being singular and "youse" being plural")
That point in the video was not about singular vs plural, it was about two distinct plurals, one referring only to the listeners, one referring to both the listeners and someone else.
Right but what I'm referring to on screen is clusivity not a simple singular/plural distinction.
ah. maybe I shouldn't watch videos about stuff I'm not knowledgeable in at 3am
Artifexian:"I recommend avoiding gender distinctions in plural forms"
Me: *Laughs in French*
Also Artifexian: *Puts "Je t'aime" as an example*
Me: *Angry French noises*
Je te déteste
@@pppppaaaaaccccchhh je hurle - french meme
What's your source on Barai having a merger of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person pronouns? And Koiari having a 1st / 3rd merger? I can't seem to find that anywhere, and I'm interested in learning more, because it might relate to my research
Oh my god, thank you for the proximate/obviate distinction, because I put one of those in a conlang but had no idea what it was called. I drew the later distinctions not by distance, but by relationship to the action of the third person speaker, and I'm not sure if that has a special name.
Singular, gender-neutral, uninflected pronouns, 1, 2, 3prox, 3obv1(4), 3obv2(5): Yo, a, ye, yij, yin.
"Stam nya hye an yij tsozamn tyin Dreugunzdon ka. (Amnulzhun.)"
"He spoke to him while he was at Dragonstone."
[Impf.continuant SPEAK topic.3s TO 4s SIMULTANEOUS locative.5s DRAGONSTONE cop. ("All parties identify as male.")]
I do most of my conlangs stream-of-consciousness, by speaking in trances and finding patterns and repeating sentences until they flow right, which means I don't usually know the technical terms for how they work, so I'm so happy this has a name (whether or not any natlangs do it).
Mandarin has three 3rd person pronouns, 他, 她, and 它. 他 is masculine/neuter, 她 is feminine, and 它 is used for non-humans, kinda like English “it.” But here’s the kicker: all three characters are pronounced “tā.” The distinction among them only exists in writing. As a result, Mandarin-speakers who learn other languages frequently use the wrong pronouns when speaking.
There is also 祂 for deities and 牠 for animals, both are still pronounced as tā
Just a quick question as I have never heard of this before: What is the paucal numbering?
Paucal refers to a form used for _a few_ things - more than singular, fewer than plural.
Where to draw the lines, depends on the language in question.
I love your beret. You make it look good. Thank you for the awesome videos too. :)
So, in Japanese, when they say (name)-San or (name)-kun or (name)-chan or (name)-sama, Is that an example of a personal marker in the 3rd person denoting class?
Those are called honorifics and have nothing to do with pronouns. English also has honorifics, but tends to put them before names.
Examples of names decorated with honorifics in English:
Mrs. Whyte
Dr. Xanders
Officer Yang
Father Gershom
@@andrasfogarasi5014 ah. Ok. Thank you for explaining that. :)
one of my heritage languages is one of those rare languages you mention at 6:17 only first and second person singular pronouns mark gender, third person and all plural pronouns don't but I is adx [aⁿdʲ] and you is idx [iⁿdʲ] if you are male, but ũ'kwe [ũʔkwe] and i'kwe [iʔkwe] if you are female
on the podcast lexicon Vally, Dr. McWhorter mentioned how english is odd with its lack of clear number in pronouns. No 2nd person plural, and with the rise of singular they the language only has a plural 1st person pronoun, if singular they takes over
Singular "they" has been in use for centuries, so the oddness is very old
@@TreetopCanopy it is not how long it is how few languages use the same 3rd person pronoun for both singular and plural
6:22 "The genders of the speaker and addressee are usually self-evident. The gender of the third person, the party being talked about, isn't always."
What if, like, there is a fictional culture where it is considered extremely rude to talk about the addresse's gender? Like, even mentioning it suggests you want to have sex with that person because why else would the gender be important to mention? Would such a culture justify the existence of a gender in the first person but not in the second person?
Does such a culture exists? If not, I would like to know if you know anything about the reasons for some of those exceptions to your 3>2>1 suggestion you mentioned.
Sounds a bit like Dwarfs from the Discworld series
Sounds like they wouldn't have gendered pronouns, if they even bother using pronouns.
Spanish isn’t actually pro-drop, but null-subject. Pro-drop languages drop pronouns in all environments, Romance languages only drop pronouns when that pronoun is the subject, with clitics being largely required.
A better example of a pro-drop language would be Japanese (which may not even have pronouns at all, depending on who you ask).
Japanese (and a number of pro-drop languages) also doesn’t have person marking on verbs, either relying on context or actively stating the noun in question (generally, someone’s name).
You're not reeeally wrong but definitions of pro-drop and null-subject a little off though :P
Pro-drop languages are those which allows certain classes of pronouns to be dropped when they're explicit by grammar (like verb conjugations) or context, like how in portuguese you can say "gostei" (lit. "(I) liked (it)") ommiting both subject and object pronouns
Null-subject is when you can omit the subject, as in "I see you" being translated to "te veo" in spanish, ommiting the subject (Yo)
A null-subject language is when you can ommit subjects, a pro-drop language is when you can drop certain pronouns, making every null-subject language also a pro-drop language (but not all pro-drop are null-subject) :P
1:01 where are the demonstratives derived from?
They can come from determiners, locative markers, verbs of existence (to-be) as is the case with Hoocąk, relative pronouns, or third person pronouns.
We know relatively little on common trends of their origin, and we're only just starting to piece it together.
In Hebrew, we mark both number and gender on *2nd person pronouns*. We have a singular masculine "you" (ata), singular feminine "you" (at), plural masculine "you" (atem) and plural feminine "you" (aten). While the distinguishing between singular masculine and feminine, though needless, isn't really a problem, the distinguishing between plural masculine and feminine only causes problems and arguments over the question - When addressing a mixed group, what pronoun should we use? Masculine or feminine?
But thankfully, the feminine plural 2nd person pronoun has been dying out, and in everyday speech, more and more people just use the masculine plural to refer to both males and females (even when they talk only about a plurality of females).
Can I make my own distinctions? Like, not gender, not plural, but time?
I've making a conlang where you'd need to change the pronoun depending on the time.
This is justified as "there was a time marker, that was always after pronoun, but after time, they murged together, and now it is not a pronoun, but rather person time marker"
Would that be ok? Also, I made a singular-dual-plural model, but What If I change the meaning of dual to "groupal", so that you mean that some people, or some items, are in a group?
Like, word people used to just indicate crowd, but then became plural form of "person".
Are such things realistic?
I don't know what to call it but because spirits and deities are factual in my world the conlang I've made for it has a a form to address those attributes as well. So when they speak they can distinguish between their physical body that is their current incarnation as well as the animating life force as separate if they really wanted to. And likewise they could speak of the Christian Trinity without being as confused (linguistically at least) since the language promotes thinking in terms that says that there is a Physical being that is inhabited by a Spiritual being which does or doesn't have a Divine essence within it.
Is anyone else getting distracted a lot by the compression artefacts in the background colour of the video?
A few people have pointed this out. I'm not getting an artifacts on my end. Are you watching with a slow internet connection? Are you watching in HD/4K?
my internet connection cannot handle anything over 1080p
I didn't mean to insult your content or how it was made, since the compression is on youtube's end: my only advice would be to not use very dark colours if you must use solid-colour backgrounds (see Tom Scott's video on why if you must ua-cam.com/video/h9j89L8eQQk/v-deo.html)
@@slaughterround643, have you tried reducing the quality of the clip? It works fine on mobile.
@@slaughterround643 or just download it with winX deluxe its like me whos opposite torrent streaming instead of download cuz I dont want the trace in my space yeh its hard to find p2p vpn so downloading is a better choice for slow stuff just like spending hours or days on ur fav game download
Hi artifexian!!! i love your videos, i’m so happy to see you upload again, heh
HOLY SHIT HE'S BACK
i love the use of "American" to refer to the indigenous people here and not having it be clarified. I know that probably wasn't conscious but Americans have a (bad) tendency to treat indigenous languages as if they used to be around but are not anymore
I suppose there isn't any American language or European languages from America so there's no real need for a distinction. English, Spanish, Portuguese, French etc spoken in America are still the same European languages. Might get more complicated if you had a distinct American language derived from English for the US. But it's always good to have America refer to more than just the country.
You mean Amerindian?
I had an idea.
A species with two heads that think independently.
-a separate pronoun person referring to the other head, like a 1.5th person
-a separate pronoun number for referring to both heads at once
me from 1 year ago, congrats for giving this beautiful idea
@@gameborgelol
its been almost 2 years and this idea is still kinds good
I don't have much knowledge to contribute here, but I'd just like to extend my thanks to Artifexian and especially all the commenters here that inject so much fascinating linguistic knowledge into my life. It's stupendously nerdy and it affirms my interest in language and culture.
INANIM, ANIM and HUM classes for 1, 2 and 3, four grammatical numbers (none, singular, plural, all) and 7 cases
5:31 Actually in Hebrew we have a second person singular and plural forms: Ata (אתה) for singular and atem (אתם) for plural
in a natural language that I speak, we have three third person markers for "this he", "that he", and "yonder he" and so for different genders and numbers
I’m a bit confused with the we
For (1,2) does does that involve plural or singular you?
Cause for my native language
We have
Tada (1,2,3)
Kami (1,3)
Ta (1,2) However if I am speaking with 2 or more people I have to use tada
Which would this belong to?
There's actually a 4th person too. It referrs to any hypothetical person. "ONE can do this"
Not exactly. The meaning and usage of a fourth person varies depending on the individual language in question. It could be an indefinite person, it could be a hypothetical person, it could be impersonal, it could be an obviative (distinguishing one third person from a different third person). It just depends on the language, but ultimately, it is still just a different distinction of the third person.
Return of the King.
Does anybody knows why did the second video disappeared?
I don't know, but I would like to know too!
@@jannovotny4797 There were some inaccuracies in how he explained 3P pronouns for non-binary people, basically taking a Eurocentric view that such pronouns had to be the result of a cultural shift to recognize non-binary people, while they are some Native American languages and cultures that have historically recognized non-binary people and had it encoded in the language for a long time. Also, he took a pretty narrow view of what non-binary means, since anthropologically, the current system among liberal westerners is not the only way to have non-binary distinctions.
@@LangThoughts Do you know which native american cultures did? It would be interesting to read on that and my knowledge about precolombian cultures is not enough to even start the research by myself.
5:29 Doesn't maori use inclusive/exclusive 2nd person plural pronouns?
hmm from same lang family id: kita we inclusive, kami we exclusive you prolly guess it the exclusive is old fashioned but not as posh as german dative
I mean, sex is sometimes self-evident. Not so much for gender though, since that's an internal thing. Therefore, there is absolutely a need for person-marking in the first person, & not in the 2nd or 3rd. You can only KNOW your own gender, & only ASSUME someone elses. Marking gender on the 2nd or 3rd person is very assumptive.
Is it possible to have independent prox-obv pronouns? If so, could possessive pronouns be unmarked for obviation? Can a language have prox-obv on top of a gender distinction?
How do dependant markers evolve in natural languages? Do these pronoun suffixes simply appear ex nihilo or do they come from an underlying historical VSO word where the subject later becomes agglutinated to the verb?
And related question: why they diverge so much even within one language. Hungarian has both -m and -k for "I", -l, -d and -sz for singular "you", -uk and -unk for "we" etc.
My guess would be from historical VSO order, but if you're making your own proto you could just add some person suffixes and not bother with origins.
Unrelated but my proclivity for listening to voices and words really kicks in whenever I watch your videos... I know it's odd but man I love that Irish ending "T", I do not know why 😆😅
I believe most Semitic languages (Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic...) not only have gender distinctions in the sing. 2nd person, but also in the pl. 2nd & 3rd.
So, I mean, not THAT rare
Also I’d love to see you look at the og version of Ithkuil. Pure suffering in linguistic form
I'm not claiming any language do that or anyone should try it in a conlang, but THEORETICALLY, you could go really nuts with "WE" (first person plural). Besides classes and multiple numbers (dual, trial etc.), you could make a series of arrangements of who is we in each person:
1st: a) me and only me; b) me and these guys I represent (like in a team, which would count as 3rd person in English)
+
2nd: a) you and only you; b) you all (multiple adressees); c) you, but not you (multiple adressees); d) not you
+ / or
3rd: a) no other person; b) those other guys; c) everybody
As I said: that is just theoretically.
I'd like to be a little stickler and say that its not always people. Objects are often given pronounts its just they aren't as often analysed as pronouns.
Classic case - "it" is an object pronoun (singular) and those/that/this can all be used like pronouns at least some of the time (even if they are defined as demonstratives).
Also its worth being mentioned that pronouns in Sign Languages are often handled in interesting ways. For BSL and ASL at least (the SLs I have varying amounts of knowledge of) tend to use indexing and related concepts for pronouns, indexing being the practise of using the index finger to point at the relevant object. While there is the option to mouth "I/you/he/she/it" the singular prounouns are handled by pointing an index finger at the relevant thing either in real space, or in signspace (signspace being the space in which you sign). This marks for literal physical location (aka left, right, forward, back, up down) and in BSL heirarchical place and/or literal size (for instance Mother(slight up), sister (same level), daughter(slight below)).
Multiples can be signed in BSL using the relevant number of fingers and passed between the number of people, which can mark for clusivity. If I want to say me and a friend (we) but not you I would just sign with two fingers pointing up and passing between me and the friend (either where they literally are or where I have placed them in the hypothetical sign space).
Finnish sign language uses pointing for pronouns too, but I don't remember how plurals work.
also side note while gender systems are based off sex in many cultures, gendered pronouns are technically based off those gender systems not based off the biological sex but thats like a *hyper nitpick*
@@valkeakirahvi Oh thanks for saying! iirc Finnish Sign Language is part of the Swedish Sign Language family which is hypothesised to be part of the Old-BSL family. So this might be because the two are distantly related or because of sign symbology in sign linguistics (i.e. the tendancy for sign languages to be very representative of the outside world with symbols and for the pointing hand to usually represent the symbol for "that thing/person)
I'd love to find a SL that does this completely differently tho
Is there like a book that goes over language rules in a bunch of languages?
There aren’t many that specifically expand over general language rules in multiple languages, but there are plenty that focus on specific areas of grammar across many languages. There are also Grammars which go in depth on the whole of a specific language. Rarely a grammar will cover a language family rather than a single language, but they tend to be closely related.
Anyways for books focusing on specific areas of grammar across languages:
Antipassive: Typology, Diachrony, and Related Constructions focuses specifically on antipassive constructions. Subordination in Native South American Languages does the same for subordination constructions specifically in South America.
Some books that cover a wider range of grammar and language structure but for specific languages are A Grammar of Cavineña by Antoine Guillaume, Nivaclé Grammar by Lyle Campbell, and A Grammar of Aguaruna by Simon Overall.
Honestly I recommend starting online and finding papers, then getting grammars of languages that interest you or have features that interest you, and keep expanding from there as you find new features and languages. Many grammars are available online, like the grammar of Enxet Sur. Getting books for specific features may be more worth it if you start getting a special interest in that feature unless you can find the book online, get it for cheap, or get it through a library (check if your library offers Worldcat). There’s usually plenty of information accessible online for specific features.
I always love getting grammars though if the language or its features are of interest to me, just check if it’s online first.
Is there a language that has both Singular, Dual, Paucal, Plural, & Collective pluralities?
Lihir has all of that minus collective.
@@the_linguist_ll thx
I'm using Navajo as a base and they have 5 suffixes for subject!
Well, prefixes, and yes, Navajo has a lot of subject prefixes, depending on person, number, animacy, and discourse relation.
in my conlang, the pronouns are chosen almost like a name, there are some loose rules for what a pronoun can be (basically any stop sound followed by a vowel) with some being more socially acceptable than others. this also means there is no 1st, 2nd or 3rd person, its all just whatever the persons chosen pronoun is
Artifexian, I wonder how you would design an alien world with other ways of communicating rather than verbally. I wonder how you would create an alien species that communicated through body language or by pheromones.
5:47 I’m sorry but since when does Tagalog have gendered pronouns? We have gendered nouns derived from Spanish but our pronouns use common gender
It's correct if I make a fourth person, which is a dead entity? (like for a example a dead person), It's still 3rd person??
Would still be third person yes, but a cool category to mark nonetheless. Nivaclé has seperate kinship terms for dead relatives, so something similar for pronouns would be cool
Thank you so much for this video. You just gave me an idea to fix a problem with my conlang's pronouns.
Finnish has a sort of 0th person, which is usually used with passive voice and doesn’t really refer to anyone in particular, mostly just an action in general that could be possibly committed. I think it’s mostly used in negative form as well.
So does German ("man") and arguably English ("one" as in "one could go to the store").
I'm pretty sure this is still a 3rd person. If it's used for non-speakers, non-addressee then it's a 3rd person. The English 'one' for example is still a third person.
Yeah, that's still a third person, it just happens to be indefinite instead of specific, like "one" or "someone" in English.
@@Artifexian I am not sure as i am not linguist, but for example in Suomi ("finnish") the passive is like: "Talossa työskennellään." translates as "people work in the house. Talo (house) -ssa (inside) työskennellä (to work) and the form työskennellään is passive form. In modern speechs that form is often used for 1. person plural form, but it can still be used as passive form.
Did you ever make a video going over the other options such as polarity and social status?
Old English and Old High German had Dual also in first and second person. wit in German and with in English which now means with/mit in English. and git in German and gith in English for you both.
"which now means with/mit in English"
The preposition "with" is completely unrelated to the 1st person dual pronoun.
I might be wrong, but I think there are some languages that have only dependant person markers and not independant ones. I know there are languages where the independant forms are impractically long and ones where they are not allowed to be used as subjects.
8:23 Wait a second, I thought that the word ending 's marks the genitive case in English, but it is said in the video that English doesn't have any cases for nouns. Can someone clear this up to me, please?
English has almost completely lost case.
It is only shown in pronouns and the genitive market for nouns as well.
I would also like to mention gender which has almost disappeared too but still exists in 3rd person pronouns and some French loanwords
ex
I, me, my shows 1st person in different cases
he, she, it, they 3rd person singular in 4 different genders
fiancé and fiancée is the only word that I can think of that is regularly changed for gender marking
Hope this helped!
oh and of course nouns with ‘s
the book’s cover is shiny
The affix -'s in English is really a clitic, not a case, as it attaches to whole phrases instead of just nouns.
@@Sovairu didnt know those existed, thanks for letting me know
@@davidmacdonald9159 You're welcome.
I'm thinking to create a pronoun system like this 1, 2, 3, 1+2, 1+3, 2+3, 1+2+3 with each case having singular dual and plural so that makes it into 21 pronouns haven't thought much about if it will have cases like genetive and nominative but idk if that's practical to have
Great video as always!
8:37 clipboard is me
Not scientifically possible!
@@FungIsSquish u caught me i’m not a clipboard
@@robdoghd yeeeah outa here with that bulll shiit, clipboards aren’t sentient
trans conlangers unite
Ur back :DDD
which is better, WorldAnvil or Campifire?
Ep!cO depends on your preferences. Personally I don’t use either but Campfire suits me more
And I like WA :D You should probably check them both out and see what you like.
just have 3 pronouns (3rd person singular/plural, 2nd person singular, 2nd person plural) and have the two first person pronouns be a modification of your 2nd person pronouns.
I really hoped you would explain paucal for example. But now I have to look it up anyway, after hearing it so many times and not knowing what it's supposed to be.
It was discussed in previous videos IIRC
@@Artifexian Oh, wow, that was a quick answer! Thank you very much, I might have just missed it.
How do dependent suffixes get suffixed though? I know it'd make sense for the pronoun to glue to end of the verb if it was in an VS order, like what happened in spanish "soy" and "estoy", but isn't the VS order quite uncommon? How could it end up being the main way of inflecting verbs in Latin and Proto-germanic (and I think in PIE too)?
Also, do dependents always come from the independent pronouns?
Just make up some suffixes if you want it Latin or PGermanic or PIE style
ku-Verb Verb-object-mu and then usually object possesive Verb-nya the latter sounds more like a marker