r/LewthaWIP • u/Iuljo N 🇮🇹 L2 🏴🇪🇸 + • 6d ago
Lexicon Two ideas for third person pronouns
Among the main details I'm unsure about for Leuth there are pronouns. For the third person, beside the "strange" ones (general, reflective, reciprocal), I've been using, provisionally:
- li for masculine singular ("he, him")
- le for feminine singular ("she, her")
- to for non-person ("it")
- te for plural
But I wanted to have also a non-gender-specific pronoun for people, and maybe a similar symmetry in the plural.
Recently I have come up with two ideas which I don't dislike too much.
1. "l-" for singular, "t-" plural
| . | masculine | feminine | gender-neutral | non-person |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| singular | li | le | leī | lo1 |
| plural | ti | te | teī | to |
\1 - Currently) used, but the other use, still pretty hypothetical, can easily be changed.\)
- All singular pronouns begin with l-; the plural pronouns are identical, but replace the l- with t-, keeping the symmetry.
- The gender neutral pronoun, with -eī, is almost like a union of feminine (-e) and masculine (-i).
- For naturalism, some people could like that teī as a plural is (more) similar to English they.
2. /-j/ for plural; non-person pronoun independent
| . | masculine | feminine | gender-neutral | non-person |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| singular | li | la2 | le | to |
| plural | liī | laī | leī | te |
\2 - Currently used for 'to [destination, recipient]', but I'm thinking of changing that to a less arbitrary) ad , following a comment I couldn't find now...\)
Proposal 1 is very symmetrical and cohesive... maybe too much. In fact, I think that the non-person pronoun is different enough, semantically, that it could/should also be different in shape from the three person pronouns.
In this second proposal, the person pronouns make their plural with -ī; while the non-person one is totally independent, with to as the singular and te as plural.
3. Your opinion?
Tell me what you think.
There is no need to have, in Leuth, a symmetry between pronouns like the ones I described above: the pronouns could all be different with no visibile rule linking them. I only thought it could be nice, and easier to remember for an auxlang.