How realistic are my pronouns?

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starrfox75
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How realistic are my pronouns?

Post by starrfox75 »

For the pronouns of [unnamed conlang] I just made a Nominative case and then added affixes to them for the Accusative, Genitive, and for 2nd person pronouns, Vocative cases.
Is this naturalistic?
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sangi39
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Re: How realistic are my pronouns?

Post by sangi39 »

starrfox75 wrote: 02 Dec 2019 02:01 For the pronouns of [unnamed conlang] I just made a Nominative case and then added affixes to them for the Accusative, Genitive, and for 2nd person pronouns, Vocative cases.
Is this naturalistic?
I can't think of any examples off the top of my head that do exactly this for all pronouns, but I think Finnish comes pretty close. IIRC, the third person pronouns and the plurals for the first and second persons decline as if, or almost as if, they were any other noun, minus overt plural-nominative marking. The first and second person singular pronouns are almost regularly declined (minä and sinä in the nominative, but the stem in other cases is minu- and sinu-.

Oh, actually, barring a couple of what seem to be irregularities (but could be regular, I don't really know the language well enough), Turkish follows much the same pattern (distinct sets of singular and plural pronouns in the first and second persons, but one stem for the third person to which the plural -lar is added). Other than that, though, it's basically a case of "stem+case suffixes".

So, yeah, I could see your plan for your conlang being "naturalistic" (in the sense of " is attested in a real-world natural language") [:)]
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Herra Ratatoskr
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Re: How realistic are my pronouns?

Post by Herra Ratatoskr »

I believe Quechua does something like this, where the case markings are the same as those used on the nouns. Also, the 2nd and 3rd person pluralize with the same morpheme as the nouns (1st person has irregular inclusive and exclusive plural suffixes). So there's that.
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