Miguel:
>In none of these languages has "the people" become a personal pronoun.
>A better example is Brazilian Portuguese, where "a gente" *is* for all
>practical purposes a personal pronoun. [...]
Sometimes you can get annoying. Here you now provide an example that
precisely means "the people" because you can't stomach Japanese pronouns
like /boku/ as valid examples based on some irrelevant criterion.
So to ignore your hairsplitting, I reiterate that noun phrases can
eventually
be used as bonified pronouns. If you can't accept Japanese, then Brazilian
Portuguese will have to do. But the examples abound in other languages.
So all this shows that the use of Mid IE *ya:u "the group" as a pronoun to
replace what is expected to have been once *tei is firmly conceivable.
Added evidence for such a root is there, as has already been discussed.
Furthermore, your and Jens' theories that *yus must be from a form
starting with something other than *y- is feeble in comparison because it
relies on a completely unproven assumption. My above theory merely
derives IE *y from an earlier *y. The idea that *y- < *y- is the simplest
hypothesis given a lack of proof for *y- < *tW-. There is no need to
assume more than one has to, which afterall is Occam's Razor in a nutshell.
= gLeN
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