Mastodawn

John Carlos Baez

‪In "she saw him", it's clear there are two third persons because they're of different genders. In "she saw her", it's clear because otherwise we'd say "she saw herself".

In "she saw her dog" it's not clear. This has always bugged me.

But if we spoke an Algonquian language, we could easily make it clear!

These languages have a "proximate" third person, meaning the closest or most important one, and an "obviative" third person, meaning the farther or less important one. Sometimes the obviative is called the "fourth person".

In other languages, like Russian, we can make it clear a different way: they have, not only reflexive pronouns like "myself, his self, herself, itself", but also a reflexive possessive: sort of like "she saw herself's dog". That obviously obviates the need for the obviative.

Algonquian languages are a family of native American languages including:

Arapahoan
Blackfoot
Cheyenne
Cree–Montagnais–Naskapi
Eastern Algonquian
Menominee
Meskwaki-Sauk-Kickapoo
Miami–Illinois
Ojibwe–Potawatomi
Shawnee

I got pulled into this from trying to understand a bit about Hopi and Navaho before I go back to the Navaho Nation. Which are *not* Algonquian languages. Hopi is an Uto-Aztecan language, and Navaho is Athabascan. But then I realized I'm incredibly ignorant of American language groups.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obviative
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algonquian_languages

Dave Volek Feb 20

@johncarlosbaez

It is interesting at how other languages have interesting ways of expressing things.

In Slovak, they can change an adjective into a verb "of becoming". For example:

stars^y = old
stars^iem = I am becoming older.
stars^ies^ = You are becoming older.

Holger Seelefand Feb 20

@johncarlosbaez also Scandinavian languages have a reflexive possessiv: in Danish, you would say: hun så sin hund (if it’s her own) vs hun så hendes hun (if it’s someone else’s).

Danes of older generations complain that younger speakers often do not use the reflexive possessives due to the influence of English.

John Carlos Baez Feb 20

@seelefand - there might be some good things that Scandinavian languages could borrow from English, but the reflexive possessive is a feature English should borrow from those languages! If I tried, I would say something "she saw herselve's dog".

Michael J. Coffey Feb 20

@johncarlosbaez Not your primary point, obviously, but Latin also has a feature like Russian. Sort of his-own or her-own distinct from some other his or hers.

John Carlos Baez Feb 20

@michaelc - Yeah! Over on Bluesky, Robert Low told me:

Latin too:

canem suum vidit (she saw her own dog) and canem eius vidit (she saw <some other person>'s dog).

Michael J. Coffey Feb 20

@johncarlosbaez Yes! Very convenient.

Mike Stay Feb 20

@johncarlosbaez If one wanted to make it especially clear, one could say, "She saw her own dog."

Bartosz Milewski Feb 20

@johncarlosbaez
I can confirm the Polish version:
- jej psa (accusative case of her dog)
- swojego psa (same but reflexive)

Pauliina Lievonen Feb 20

@johncarlosbaez In spoken Finnish, all but one of those sentences could be ”it saw it”. The one exception would be ”it saw itself”. Man, woman, dog, chair, doesn’t matter.

John Carlos Baez Feb 20

@Pauliinalievonen - Neat! So the Finns can be very terse and ambiguous if they want. But what if they don't want? Can they use genders and say "he saw her?"

Pauliina Lievonen Feb 21

@johncarlosbaez "He" and "her" are the same word, "hän", mostly used in written Finnish. So to be completely clear you have to use the persons name, or say "the woman" or "the man" or something like that anyway.

I thought of an example, imagine I was telling you about something I saw in the park. That might go something like this: "This morning in the park I saw this woman with a dog, and it, the woman, bought an icecream. Then it gave it to the dog to lick, but it ate the whole thing!

So as the story goes on I would use "it" more often because it's already clear who is doing what.

The Blue Wizard Feb 21

@johncarlosbaez As a ASL (American Sign Language) signer, I can tell you ASL has a very powerful "pronoun" system, and one can easily specific which one is which using spatial deictic 'markers'. So I can easily say "We three go to a store" where "we" includes me and my friends next to me, using the "3" handshape. Or I can explicitly exclude my friends, instead mentioning other ones, with the same handshape, but move it differently. Practically infinite ways to do it!!!

Mataigneth Feb 21

@johncarlosbaez in French it's even worse than in English. It's the same word for his and her. In fact it's "son" in both cases if the possessed object's name is masculine and "sa" if it's feminine (names have a gender without any reason except what the dictionary says).

@johncarlosbaez in spoken English you'd try to distinguish the two by changing the the way the words are stressed within the sentence, so maybe it's just our writing system that's not up to the job.

In Japanese there's a word similar to 'oneself' that applies to the topic of the sentence, so in the spoken language you'd end up with:

That woman saw herself's dog.
あの女の人は自分の犬を見た。

vs

That woman saw another woman's dog.
あの女の人は他の女の人の犬を見た。

(E&OE, I'm still not very good at the language)

John Carlos Baez Feb 22

@Simian60 - so English is starting to seem uniquely poor it in its ability to make this distinction *in writing*. Thanks!