Date: Sun, 9 Nov 1997 08:52:40 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199711091352.IAA27618@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: Ivan A Derzhanski Sender: Lojban list From: Ivan A Derzhanski Subject: Re: The design of Lojban X-To: The Lojban List To: John Cowan Status: OR X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 1648 X-From-Space-Date: Sun Nov 9 08:52:45 1997 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU Mark E. Shoulson wrote: > >From: HACKER G N > >Lojban forces a choice about whether or not to include the listener > >in the "we" pronoun, and the only group of languages I know of that force > >this same choice are the Melanesian languages of Papua New Guinea. > > Surely not that rare. Cherokee and Hawai'ian also force this. Yes. It is the rule rather than the exception in their families, too (Iroquoian and Austronesian). > I shouldn't be surprised if it were quite common among Native > American languages, It's what happens in the Algonquian family, in Yucatec (Mayan) and Quechua (Andean). In Nahuatl (Uto-Aztecan) and Choctaw (Muskogean) it doesn't, in Eskimo it doesn't either. > and other language groups. There is the Dravidian family, the Mongolic and Tungusic (though not the Turkic) branch of Altaic, part of the Afro-Asiatic family, North Central Caucasian (though not North West or North East), Svan (but not the other Kartvelian languages), part of Sino-Tibetan, ... Ainu and Nivkh (but not Basque). > (Frankly, I find it a little surprising it's not more common.) It's pretty common. What is surprising is that it is not universal. -- `Meum est propositum in taberna mori; Vinum sit appositum sitienti ori: Ut dicant cum venerint angelorum chori "Deus sit propitius isti potatori".' (Archpoet of Cologne, `The Confession of Golias') Ivan A Derzhanski H: cplx Iztok bl 91, 1113 Sofia, Bulgaria W: Dept for Math Lx, Inst for Maths & CompSci, Bulg Acad of Sciences