2.2 : Pronomial Morphology2.2.1 : PreliminariesPronomial morphology is based on the fact that all pronouns, though admittedly somewhat individualists as grammatical categories go, are essentially always nouns at heart. For this reason, the pronoun structure is designed along those lines.Degaspregos pronouns, though having some aspect of gender, do not rigidly require the use of any specific gender with antecedents (though if one does choose to use gender in making a distinction, then one ought to make the gender correspond with the biological gender if that is possible). Because of this flexibility, Degaspregos has (at least right now) nine
gender qualifiers in comparison to the normal Eurocentric three or two:
a common gender (i.e., unspecified); the normal masculine, feminine and neuter
forms; animate and inanimate; mutable and immutable; and a spiritual gender.
All pronouns are based on the pronomial morpheme -e- [e:] which ties all
pronouns together (this may be thought of as a pronomial root). The following
chart deals with the four main genders:
You may have noticed that the pronomial structure seems to be based around the third person forms and the common forms. This it is indeed. But then, why don't the gendered forms for third person also follow the paradigms above (meos (com.)-> w+a+meos (masc.))? Why don't they go seos -> *waseos ? Well they could. There is nothing in the grammar which forbids this. It's just faster to combine the masculine morpheme w- with the the base pronoun -eos. Okay then, what this about "common"? Well, that's because the full paradigm has not yet been revealed; The paucal and plural forms follow thus:
Just like the gender situation, pronouns don't necessarily insist on using number, so one could go ahead and be really ambiguous and use forms like seos, referring (e.g.) to a group of five men (which would normally require both the paucal and masculine forms). But it is preferable not to use the language like this, if only because it puts a greater burden on the audience to interpret what one is trying to say, which of course leads to possible misinterpretations.
They can't do this because they would then have to agree both with their antecedent and with the word being described, which, given the present system, could lead to a confusing jumble of number endings (note that European pronouns have to do this too, but they get around the confusion by having the compensatory confusion of separate lexical items for plural forms: my but our, his/her/its but their and so on). Observe:
"They know our friends." *"Seosi meosiami prioromi woidat."
me-o-s-i-a-m-i
Note also the double marking both for part of speech and for syntactic function that would be used under this system (-o- for the noun part, but -a- for the adjectival part; -s- for a nominative that doesn't exist, and also -m- for the accusative case matching the noun being described). Degaspregos gets around this by a rather nifty way of using the Genitive case, which would act in combination with the other cases, and thus can actually act like a specialized adjective ending without actually being one. Thus, the above sentence would only be: Seosi meosoimi prioromi woidatani. Here, you see, there is no irrational use of the nominative (or whatever other
case you'd use, as in the above other example).
Anyway, I have only a few more comments about pronouns:
Because pronouns are simply only very generalized nouns, they also
behave in similar ways to nouns: each pronoun takes the same case
forms as their antecedents (q. v.).
So, though the pronomial system of Degaspregos could conceivably be
quite complex, it would not be difficult to learn it due to the agglutinating
nature of the language -- because it builds the words morpheme by
morpheme, it is not difficult to derive meanings even when one has never
seen a given form before (this in fact echoes the whole nature of human
language in general).
"Cogito, ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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