This article describes the
personal
Personal may refer to:
Aspects of persons' respective individualities
* Privacy
* Personality
* Personal, personal advertisement, variety of classified advertisement used to find romance or friendship
Companies
* Personal, Inc., a Washington, ...
pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not co ...
systems of various
Austronesian languages.
Proto-languages
In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unattest ...
The
Proto-Austronesian
Proto-Austronesian (commonly abbreviated as PAN or PAn) is a proto-language. It is the reconstructed ancestor of the Austronesian languages, one of the world's major language families. Proto-Austronesian is assumed to have begun to diversify 3 ...
and Proto-Malayo-Polynesian
personal pronoun
Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as ''I''), second person (as ''you''), or third person (as ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', ''they''). Personal pronouns may also take dif ...
s below were reconstructed by
Robert Blust
Robert A. Blust (; ; May 9, 1940 – January 5, 2022) was an American linguist who worked in several areas, including historical linguistics, lexicography and ethnology. He was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. Blus ...
.
In 2006,
Malcolm Ross also proposed seven different pronominal categories for persons. The categories are listed below, with the Proto-Austronesian first person singular ("I") given as examples.
#Neutral (e.g., PAN *i-aku)
#Nominative 1 (e.g., PAN *aku)
#Nominative 2 (e.g., PAN *=ku, *
ku)
#Accusative (e.g., PAN *i-ak-ən)
#Genitive 1 (e.g., PAN *=
u)
#Genitive 2 (e.g., PAN *(=)m-aku)
#Genitive 3 (e.g., PAN *n-aku)
The following is from Ross' 2002 proposal of the Proto-Austronesian pronominal system, which contains five categories, including the free (i.e., independent or unattached), free polite, and three genitive categories.
Formosan languages
The Formosan languages are a geographic grouping comprising the languages of the indigenous peoples of Taiwan, all of which are Austronesian. They do not form a single subfamily of Austronesian but rather nine separate subfamilies. The Taiwa ...
Rukai
Below are Rukai pronouns from Zeitoun (1997).
Paul Jen-kuei Li's classification of Rukai dialects is given for reference.
*Rukai
**''Mantauran'' (萬山 Wanshan) – 250-300 speakers
**(Main branch)
***Maga-Tona
****''Maga'' (馬加 Majia)
****''Tona'' (多納 Duona)
***Budai-Tanan (Rukai Proper)
****''Budai'' (霧台 Wutai)
****''Tanan'' (大南 Danan)
Tsouic
The personal pronouns below are from the Tfuya dialect of Tsou, and are sourced from Zeitoun (2005:277). Note that third-person pronouns are distinguished between those that are visible (abbreviated ''vis.'' below) or non-visible.
Northwestern Formosan
Pazeh
The Pazeh personal pronouns below are from Li (2000). (''Note'': vis. = visible, prox. = proximal)
Saisiyat
Saisiyat has an elaborate pronominal system (Hsieh & Huang 2006:93).
Thao
The
Thao personal pronouns below are from Blust (2003:207). Note that there is only 1 form each for "we (exclusive)," "you (plural)" and "they."
Favorlang
The following
Favorlang personal pronouns are from Li (2003:8). All of them are free forms. All genitive pronouns end with -a.
Atayalic
The Wulai and Mayrinax Atayal personal pronouns below are sourced from Huang (1995). In both varieties, the nominative and genitive forms are bound while the neutral and locative ones are free (unbound).
Wulai Atayal
Mayrinax Atayal
Teruku Seediq
East Formosan
Siraya
The
Siraya personal pronouns below are from Adelaar (1997).
Taivoan
The
Taivoan personal pronouns:
Kavalan
The
Kavalan personal pronouns below are from Li (2006:30).
Basay
The
Basay personal pronouns below are from Li (1999:639).
Bunun
Takivatan Bunun personal pronoun roots are (De Busser 2009:453):
*1s: -ak-
*2s: -su-
*3s: -is-
*1p (incl.): -at-
*1p (excl.): -ðam-
*2p: -(a)mu-
*3p: -in-
The tables of Takivatan Bunun personal pronouns below are sourced from De Busser (2009:441).
Iskubun Bunun personal pronouns are somewhat different (De Busser 2009:454).
Paiwan
The Kuɬaɬau Paiwan personal pronouns below are from Ferrell (1982:14).
Puyuma
The Nanwang Puyuma personal pronouns below are from Teng (2008:61-64).
Malayo-Polynesian languages
Philippine languages
The Philippine languages or Philippinic are a proposed group by R. David Paul Zorc (1986) and Robert Blust (1991; 2005; 2019) that include all the languages of the Philippines and northern Sulawesi, Indonesia—except Sama–Bajaw (languages ...
Ilokano
Ilokano personal pronouns distinguish three cases:
absolutive
In grammar, the absolutive case (abbreviated ) is the case of nouns in ergative–absolutive languages that would generally be the subjects of intransitive verbs or the objects of transitive verbs in the translational equivalents of nominative– ...
,
ergative, and
oblique
Oblique may refer to:
* an alternative name for the character usually called a slash (punctuation) ( / )
* Oblique angle, in geometry
*Oblique triangle, in geometry
*Oblique lattice, in geometry
* Oblique leaf base, a characteristic shape of the b ...
. They also distinguish three numbers:
singular
Singular may refer to:
* Singular, the grammatical number that denotes a unit quantity, as opposed to the plural and other forms
* Singular homology
* SINGULAR, an open source Computer Algebra System (CAS)
* Singular or sounder, a group of boar, ...
,
dual
Dual or Duals may refer to:
Paired/two things
* Dual (mathematics), a notion of paired concepts that mirror one another
** Dual (category theory), a formalization of mathematical duality
*** see more cases in :Duality theories
* Dual (grammatical ...
and
plural
The plural (sometimes abbreviated pl., pl, or ), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the default quantity represented by that noun. This de ...
.
Accent marks in the following table are not written, but given here for pronunciation purposes.
Tagalog
Like nouns,
Tagalog personal pronouns are categorized by case. As above, the indirect forms also function as the genitive.
Cebuano
Like nouns,
Cebuano personal pronouns are categorized by case.
*''The two sets of tag-iya case function similarly except that the primary tag-iya would need the unifying linker nga and the modifier tag-iya cannot be used as complementary adjective.''
**''The final syllable of a primary tag-iya pronoun is mostly dropped.''
When the pronoun is not the first word of the sentence, the short form is more commonly used than the full form.
*''When the object is a second person pronoun, use ta instead of ko.''
Malay
Malay may refer to:
Languages
* Malay language or Bahasa Melayu, a major Austronesian language spoken in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore
** History of the Malay language, the Malay language from the 4th to the 14th century
** Indonesi ...
The informal pronouns ''aku, kamu, engkau, ia, kami,'' and ''kita'' are indigenous to Malay. However, there are more personal pronouns according to formality, see more at
Malay grammar
Malay and Indonesian grammar is the body of rules that describe the structure of expressions in the Malay language (Brunei, Malaysia, and Singapore) and Indonesian (Indonesia and Timor Leste). This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses ...
.
;Possessive pronouns
''Aku, kamu, engkau'', and ''ia'' have short possessive
enclitic
In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a wo ...
forms. All others retain their full forms like other nouns, as does emphatic ''dia'': ''meja saya, meja kita, meja anda, meja dia'' "my table, our table, your table, his/her table".
Javanese
Javanese lacks some personal pronouns. For the first person plural, Javanese use ''awaké dhèwè'', literally meaning "the body itself" (cf. Malay : badannya sendiri) or just ''dhèwè'', that originally means "itself" or "alone". For the third person singular, Javanese uses ''dhèwèké'' that means "itself" (cf. Malay: ), from + ''-k-'' (archaic glottal stop)+ ''-(n)é'' (3rd person possessive enclitic), or ' (cf. Malay: ) that means "the person", from ''wong'' (person)+ ''-(n)é'' (3rd person possessive enclitic, that is also used for demonstrative).
The rest of plural pronouns uses words ''kabèh''/''sedaya''/''sedanten'', all of them meaning "all" after the singular form.
;Possessive pronouns
, and have short possessive
enclitic
In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a wo ...
forms. All others retain their full forms like other nouns: , , "my house (formal), our house (informal), your house (more formal)".
Polynesian languages
The Polynesian languages form a genealogical group of languages, itself part of the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian family.
There are 38 Polynesian languages, representing 7 percent of the 522 Oceanic languages, and 3 percent of the Austron ...
Tongan
The Tongan cardinal pronouns are the main
personal pronoun
Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as ''I''), second person (as ''you''), or third person (as ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', ''they''). Personal pronouns may also take dif ...
s which in Tongan can either be preposed (before the
verb
A verb () is a word (part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descri ...
) or postposed (after the verb). The first are the normal pronouns, the latter the stressed pronouns, which are also used as
reflexive pronoun
A reflexive pronoun is a pronoun that refers to another noun or pronoun (its antecedent) within the same sentence.
In the English language specifically, a reflexive pronoun will end in ''-self'' or ''-selves'', and refer to a previously n ...
s.
Samoan
Like many Austronesian languages, Samoan has separate words for
inclusive and exclusive we
In linguistics, clusivity is a grammatical distinction between ''inclusive'' and ''exclusive'' first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called ''inclusive " we"'' and ''exclusive "we"''. Inclusive "we" specifically includes the addressee ...
, and distinguishes
singular
Singular may refer to:
* Singular, the grammatical number that denotes a unit quantity, as opposed to the plural and other forms
* Singular homology
* SINGULAR, an open source Computer Algebra System (CAS)
* Singular or sounder, a group of boar, ...
,
dual
Dual or Duals may refer to:
Paired/two things
* Dual (mathematics), a notion of paired concepts that mirror one another
** Dual (category theory), a formalization of mathematical duality
*** see more cases in :Duality theories
* Dual (grammatical ...
, and
plural
The plural (sometimes abbreviated pl., pl, or ), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the default quantity represented by that noun. This de ...
. The root for the inclusive pronoun may occur in the singular, in which case it indicates emotional involvement on the part of the speaker.
In formal speech, fuller forms of the roots ''mā-'', ''tā-'', and ''lā-'' are ''‘imā-'', ''‘itā-'', and ''‘ilā-.''
Hawaiian
The a-class possessive pronouns refer to
alienable possession
In linguistics, inalienable possession (abbreviated ) is a type of possession in which a noun is obligatorily possessed by its possessor. Nouns or nominal affixes in an inalienable possession relationship cannot exist independently or be "alie ...
, as with boats, children, clothing, and spouses. The o-class possessive pronouns refer to inalienable (incapable of being begun or ended) possession, as with parents and body parts.
[Schütz, Albert J. 1995. ''All About Hawaiian'', U. of Hawaii Press.]
See also
*
:Pronouns by language
*
Fossilized affixes in Austronesian languages Fossilized affixes abound in Austronesian languages.
Formosan languages
Li and Tsuchida (2009) lists various fossilized reflexes of Proto-Austronesian infixes *-al-, *-aR-, and *-aN- in all major Formosan languages as well as Tagalog and Javanes ...
Notes and references
Further reading
* Li, Paul Jen-kuei. 1997. "A Syntactic Typology of Formosan Languages – Case Markers on Nouns and Pronouns." In Li, Paul Jen-kuei. 2004. Selected Papers on Formosan Languages. Taipei, Taiwan: Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica.
{{refend
Pronouns by language
Austronesian languages
Malayo-Polynesian languages
Formosan languages
Philippine languages
Languages of Southeast Asia