User talk:Dairhenien

If you ahve an IM I coudl talk to you directly if you want. The Emperor Zelos 20:55, March 28, 2012 (UTC)

I use gmail for IM purposes: -email address redacted-. Dairhenien 11:49, March 29, 2012 (UTC)

Could you by any chance get skype? it is considerbly easier talking through it The Emperor Zelos 17:25, March 29, 2012 (UTC) Not at work, I'm afraid, but at home I have Skype. Where are you located geographically? We can figure out a time. I'm East Coast US, GMT -4. Dairhenien 20:09, March 29, 2012 (UTC)

GMT +1 Sweden The Emperor Zelos 21:01, March 29, 2012 (UTC)

Hmmmm, so by the time I get off work, it's nearly midnight for you. Tell you what, why don't you let me know what times are convenient for you, and I'll work around them. Dairhenien 12:10, March 30, 2012 (UTC)

Sundays I usually can all day :P The Emperor Zelos 12:54, March 30, 2012 (UTC)

Fourth Person
I would like to point out Fourth person pronoun isnt a place, a place isn't in the pronoun paradigm but deals with Pro-Forms, Pronouns deals with I, You, He/She/it.

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Thanks for the comment! (I'd address you by name, but the comment was not signed.)

I agree that the standard pronoun paradigm has three persons, as those are ones almost universally instantiated. However, this Wikipedia article makes an interesting point. The relevant passage is quoted below:


 * "The grammars of some languages divide the semantic space into more than three persons. The extra categories may be termed fourth person, fifth person, etc. Such terms are not absolute but can refer depending on context to any of several phenomena."

In other words, it is not unknown, even in the typology of real world languages, to find additional "person" categories. When confronted with the decision of how to name this category, which uses different morphology than any other person, I chose to call it 4th person. If you have an alternative suggestion, I would be open to hearing it. Dairhenien 20:21, March 30, 2012 (UTC)

EDIT: Your question spurred my curiosity. I've found lots of interesting stuff on grammatical person. Ojibwe, for example, is analyzed as having a total of 14 persons, based on criteria such as animacy. Other languages use 4th person to refer to an indefinite (such as on in French), or to distinguish between topical and non-topical subjects. Once again, thanks for the interesting question! Dairhenien 20:27, March 30, 2012 (UTC)

It was me Zelos :P

I would say thats not 14 persons but various subdivisions of third person, Fourth person in those languages that do have it is more of a person within a story pronoun but is just another subdivision of third person. Everything other than The speaker and the spoken to falls under third person The Emperor Zelos 21:09, March 30, 2012 (UTC)

There, we're getting into a discussion of terminology. There appear to be traditions in language typology that hold for given language families, based on the categorization schema that was used when they were initially described. Indo European languages are invariably described in terms of three grammatical persons, and up to three grammatical genders. Other traditions exist for Bantu languages, which have gender-like categories that mark for various levels of animacy. Native American languages that use different forms for more and less topical third person pronouns are often described in terms of a fourth person.

I say all of that to say this: description of grammatical forms owe as much, or more, to tradition than they do to actual typology. One of the glorious things about constructed language is that we have the chance to choose, not only our grammar and phonology, but also the ways in which we choose to describe it. Dairhenien 20:16, March 31, 2012 (UTC)