> >Miguel and I volley the ball back and forth:
> >>>>Japanese? You know that's not a valid comparison.
> >>>
> >>>How is it not?
> >>
> >>There's no pronoun avoidance in PIE.
> >
> >Where did you come up with that term? Japanese doesn't
have "pronoun
> >avoidance" any more than Spanish... oh by the way Spanish /usted/
> >which is from what I hear from /vuestra merced/ "your mercy". Also,
> >Portuguese /você/ < /vossa mercê/, same thing. All of these
examples
> >are valid examples of a pronoun replaced by a noun.
>
And the Dutch calque /U/ < /Uwe Genade/
> Yes, and associated with a hierarchical socio-political system.
Nothing
> like that was going on at the time of PIE (or Proto-Japanese, for
that
> matter).
No hierarchical socio-political system in PIE, with their track
record. I think not.
But no matter. A principal quesion: do you believe that 'pronoun' is
a necessary category in language, such that every individual language
necessarily must have a set of them?
If so, then this would answer the question of the missing Japanese
pronouns, they must then have been lost in the course of time.
Personally, I think the idea of a pronoun requires a certain amount
of self-reflection on the part of a culture. V. Toporov already in
the early nineties (Grrr!) wrote an article in which he compared the
1st p. sg. root *m-n- to the ubiquitous *m-n- (see Ruhlen's Proto-
World for examples) root for "mind", "think", "feel" (even adduces
Heidegger's derivation of 'meinen' from 'mein'!). If this is so, then
the 1st sg pronoun (and with it probably the very idea of using
pronouns) was _borrowed_ by various languages together with the idea
of a mind as something separate from one's physical existence (*m-n-
"spirit of the deceased" eg. Latin 'Manes'; BTW Ruhlen's other *m-n-
root includes English 'mound', now tell me that _that_ doesn't imply
the emergence of a culture that believed in the separateness and
immortality of the soul). This, of course, is not good if one wants
to reconstruct Nostratic (especially since numbers can be borrowed
too). But maybe that _is_ what happened.
Torsten