Re: Latin 3rd person pronouns [was Re: No pronoun, no article]
| From: | Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, October 20, 2003, 19:48 |
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On Sunday, October 19, 2003, at 10:17 , John Cowan wrote:
> Garth Wallace scripsit:
>
>> Hm? Where did you get this?
More than half a century's familiarity with the language.
>> I distinctly remember learning masculine,
>> feminine, and neuter 3rd person pronouns in high school Latin.
>
> You're probably thinking of "is, ea, id", which are basically
> demonstratives:
> weak ones that aren't strongly labeled proximal or distal, but
> demonstratives nonetheless.
Yes, I can well imagine a High School text book might present them as 3rd
person
pronoun. But, as John says, they are strictly demonstratives, e.g.
id flumen est Arar - this triver is the Arar
sub id tempus - about this time
ea res ut est Heluetiis enuntiata - when this matter was disclosed to the
Helvetians
As John says, this demonstrative was not strongly marked and had rather
the meaning
of French 'ce', 'cet', 'cette', 'ces'.
Like all adjectives, the demonstrative adjectives could be used
substantively, i.e.
is = this person (I referred to just now) i.e. 'he'
But they were by no means confined to the 3rd person in this use, e.g.
is sum qui feci - I'm the one who did (it).
For more precise markings of proximity or distance Latin had:
ille, illa, illud - that (over there, yonder) (Fr. ce.....là etc.)
hic, haec, hoc - this (here, near me) (Fr. ce....ci etc)
as well as:
iste, ista, istud - that (near you, of yours).
_All_ of these demonstrative could stand duty for 3rd person pronoun
meaning,
which meant Latin could use pronouns unambiguously far more than English
can.
> They didn't make it into the Romance
> languages, which basically use descendants of "ille" for their articles,
> with the exception of Sardinian which uses "ipse", and some dialects of
> insular Catalan which use both "ille" and "ipse" with a semantic
> contrast.
Yep - and Classical 'ipse', 'ipsa', 'ipsum' was an emphasizer rather like
Frech '-même' or German 'selbst'. 'ipse' - he himself, the very person
(even,
like 'himself' in Anglo Irish, it could mean 'the boss', 'the master' :)
Ray
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