This series of posts are an attempt to take to an idea from the Crazy Conlang Ideas on Facebook and make it usable.

The crazy idea is: “gendered noun language”. Not gendered as in masculine and feminine, gendered as in “the indicators of nominal category are the same as the person marking on the verb.”

The initial attempt at description was as above: the clitics that indicated person were identical to those that indicated nominal category. The 1st person clitic attached to the root for ‘father’ indicated ‘biological father’; the 2nd person clitic similarly attached indicated ‘father-in-law’, a non-biological but nonetheless real relationship; the 3rd person clitic so attached indicated ‘Father, community leader’, someone who fulfilled a similar role for the broader community whether or not the individual was related to the speaker.  I would have provided glosses, but the initial draft is no more, and that’s a good thing.

The loss of the initial draft made me think while I was reconstructing it: why was it so hard to relate the personal endings with the categories of nouns? What underlying theory could justify such a strange and thorough-going behavior? Then I realized that I been trying to implement the theory in the reverse order. The personal meaning of the clitics, although it was the most distinct aspect of the surface form, was secondary. I had to start with the gender category of the clitics, and explain their origin. This origin was not as conventional personal clitics nor as categorical ones, but as deictic markers!  It is not uncommon for 3rd person deictics to evolve into personal pronouns, but the ancestors of the “current” speakers of this language had taken this deictic shift to another level: a minimally three-level deictic system had been transformed into a personal system for the verbs and a gendered system for the nouns.

What were the implications for the language from this revelation? Firstly, the original, more conventional, pronoun system was long gone and irrecoverable.  Certainly, I could create something ex nihilo, but it would have no effect on the current state of the language, so why would I do it? Secondly, if the origin of the current pronouns was based on clitics, there was no need for three separate roots for person; a single root PRONOUN would do. Thirdly, if spatial deictic clitics could provide the source for the personal number clitics and the noun gender clitics, other deictic clitics in the same slot normally associated exclusively with pronouns could interact with nouns in interesting ways.