Thursday, September 19, 2013

Grammatical Persons

My current project is called 'Weddish', a conservative Judeo-Christian marriage auxlang.  I'm having a lot of fun designing a grammar that combines Yiddish, Hebrew, English, and then whatever I want!  The first part I want to share with you is the internal debate I had about grammatical person.

At first, I wasn't going to do anything special besides having singular, plural, and dual number.  (Dual would make couples stand out by having their own verb conjugation and pronouns.)  that lasted about five minutes.  On the first day of class, however, my professor went on and on about how "the two shall become one flesh" and how he could no longer think of himself as a (lone) individual, that being married for 40 years had changed his identity.

"Not only are your bank accounts merged, but your outlook on life becomes 'we' not 'I'" Under the Canopy, David & Esther Gross, p.17

So then I thought, This will be a language only spoken between husband and wife, so there will be no first or second person singular -- on the verb or in pronouns of the core cases.  And I went with that up until about an hour ago.  But a language will not live and grow with such severe limitations.  So now I have a new idea.

What if there were a full system of first, second, and third person, and a full set of numbers -- singular, dual, and plural, but one has to refer to oneself and address other people with the singular for the unmarked and the dual for the married.  Like my second idea, married people can still refer to themselves singularly in cases other than the ergative and absolutive.  But as in Israel today, which has gendered forms of the second person, it would be hard to answer the phone politely in Weddish, because you don't know the marital status of unfamiliar callers.


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