Re: Tour (5)

--- In Nostratica@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:

> On Tue, 10 Jun 2003 19:04:33 +0000, tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...>
> wrote:
>
> >I would argue
> >something like this (this is not news): Japanese does fine without
> >pronouns, so obviously pronouns are not a philosophically

necessary

> >category in languages; can we therefore exclude that the idea
> >of "pronoun" arose with the spread of a set of ideas

of "animateness"

> >or the like
>
> Yes, we can pretty much exclude that. Japanese does have personal
> pronouns, even if their use is somewhat avoided in the language.

For

> Japanese-Ryukyuan, Starostin reconstructs the pronouns *bà "I" and

*ná

> "thou", which (irrespective of the accuracy of Starostin's
> reconstructions), to me implies that modern Japanese does not

represent a

> pristine stage of p.p.-less languages, but that it had "normal"

personal

> pronouns in its past, as indeed all languages do.
>
>

Pretty much exclude it, based on a reconstruction, irrespective of
its accuracy? Hm. And still there's that inconvenient similarity with
extra-Nostratic pronouns.

Torsten