Re: Utility of Articles (was: Rise of the Feminine)

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, enlil@... wrote:

> Richard:
> > What function did gender agreement achieve? Was it ever justified
> > as a means of separating adjectives and nouns? In PIE, was it

just

> > a means of having contrasting 3rd person pronouns? (Classifiers
> > have that use in Thai; I'd guess also in Chinese.
>
> Not sure what you mean here but Chinese has a single pronoun "ta"
> (high level tone). There is sometimes also "tie" (rising tone) for
> inanimate objects.
>
> Classifiers are used but not as pronouns if I understand you right.
> Generally, they are used beside numbers like "yi-ge ren" (literally
> "one CLASSIFIER person").

Thai differs in several ways. It uses the classifiers with
cardinals, ordinals and demonstratives, and the word order is noun-
CLASSIFIER-demonstrative/ordinal or noun-cardinal-classifier. The
classifiers tend to be used as pronouns, often like the English
pronoun(?) 'one', as in 'I'll have the big ones.' The word for the
cardinal 'one' can be placed afer the classifier, and then
means 'a'. One Thai-English dictionary therefore decided to
translate all the classifiers as 'a'! However, this construction
isn't used with anything like the frequency of the English indefinite
article. Most of the 2nd person pronouns (if that they be) can also
be used as 3rd person, but I'd be very wary of using them to
distinguish human participants.

> I'm a careless foreign sinophone that has forgotten many
> of the classifiers I was taught, but that's okay because most
> Chinese have too :)

The same's supposed to go for Thai!

> Swahili uses various pronouns for the 3p depending on the
> word-class of the noun.

Thai seems to be heading down that route. To confuse matters, a lot
of nouns have a (removable) classificatory prefix that usually has no
direct relationship to the classifier.

Richard.