this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
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How the f*uck do I find out what the third-person singular pronouns of ancient languages sounded like and what the f*uck do I do with sign languages

And perhaps easier for people here to answer: What are the gender-neutral or non-binary pronouns of your native languages? What are the histories of these pronouns? Even if it isn't a language of Europe it'd be interesting to hear about.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Extra context for "What do I do with sign languages?"

All sign languages that I'm aware of use roughly the same sign for the third-person singular pronoun, namely, pointing to that person, or at the locus in the signing space associated with that person if thon is not physically present.

This means that we could on the one hand (heh) assume that all sign languages in history have used this system of indexicality, and that sign languages have always existed wherever deaf people have existed, and that deaf people have existed everywhere humans in general have existed, and therefore not just all of Europe but the entire world has always shared the one unifying gender-neutral pronoun of simply pointing at someone -- at least among those proficient in a sign language. On the other hand, we could also assume that prior to the advent of deaf schools that deaf people might've had village signs in large cities, and otherwise might have had home signs or similar not-quite-languages, and so it's only after the advent of deaf schools that we should start to include Index3 on the map on any large scale. Before then we should only include Index3 if a village sign is attested in a given location, e.g. VLSF is estimated to have had c. 200 signers in Paris in 1750.

Extra context for "How do I find out the 3S pronouns of ancient languages?"

There are a lot of ancient languages that are poorly attested or where the comparative method or internal reconstruction can only get us so far. There are also a lot of languages where I'm not sure if I can't figure out their deals because I'm bad at finding information, or because that information literally does not exist.

The particular thorns in my side Thus Far are the Caucasian languages, Hurro-Urartian, the Anatolian languages, Samoyedic, Ugric, the Paleo-European languages, Armenian, and the Iranian languages. For that matter we might as well add PIE into the mix of mysteries due to the theories that its three-gender system resulted from a split in an earlier animate-inanimate distinction. I'm also somewhat worried that I'd be unaware of some interesting dialectal pronouns throughout history.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Turkish only has one 3rd person pronoun: O.

Man, woman, neither, dog, cat, table, door doesn't matter. In fact there are no genders or any articles in turkish grammar it's pretty neat. And thats kind of the history already, omitting some details about the male being the norm for human, since it's a grammatically nongendered language it never needed gendered pronouns.

German on the other hand I'm hoping someone else will speak to because I'd like to know as well.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

German was incidentally what inspired this project, because I had read here about various German neopronouns, of which the most interesting was hen (dat. hem gen. henser). German hen was loaned from Scandinavian hen, the first attestation of which was in Swedish in the 1960s when it was first proposed. Swedish in turn got hen from Finnish hän, which has always been a gender-neutral language. Hän itself originates as an irregular debuccalization (apparently a reduced form) of Proto-Finno-Ugric *sen from Proto-Uralic *se(n).

But German seems to have a lot of different pronouns currently competing for the top spot, another proposal is apparently loaning English they and "germanizing" it into dey (acc. demm, dat. denen, gen. derer; alternative inflections exist). There is also the sere-German proposal of using a portmanteau of sie and er, sier (acc. sien, dat. siem, gen. sieser; alternative inflections exist). And there are many many many other proposals.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

This will at least get me a lot further altha it doesn't seem like it's got everything I'm looking for, should've remembered that Google Scholar exists

Also what the heck is your username

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

John Brown can make me poop any day