What are the categories of pronouns?

[zompist]

dakedo,

but

ima,

now

[sono

that

kanojo]

she

mo

too

ne,

EM

nanka,

like

kookai,

regret

kono

this

mae

before

tegami

letter

ni

in

kaite

writing

kite

coming

ne,

EM

yappari

as-expected

kookai

regret

shite

doing

ne

EM

However, that she has written [to me] telling [me] that [she] regrets, as expected, that [she] regrets [what she did].

It might be relevant that demonstratives, according to Masayoshi Shibatani (The languages of Japan p. 258), don't work like English ones. They are modifiers with less restrictions than English demonstratives; he gives the example ookina sono issatu no Taroo no hon, lit. "big that-of one of Taro of book". That is, you can't say "big that Taro's book" in English, but it's fine in Japanese. So possibly this is not so much a fact about pronouns as one about demonstratives.

But, very interesting example!

However, the really interesting part comes with the next examples. In his words, these show how pronouns can ‘serve also as nicknames or terms of address, a feature which is very nominal in nature’:

boku,

I

doo

how

shita

did

no?

QU

Boku [ie, little boy], what happened?

oi

hey

kanojo!

she

sake

sake

motte

bring

koi!

come-imperative

Hey kanojo [ie, you]! Bring some sake! (rough and impolite)

Again, very interesting, thanks for looking these up.

I'd note though that you can do the same in English: "Hey you, bring us beer!" We can certainly say "You! Tell your story."

The boku examples shows (I believe) an interesting phenomenon described by Takao Suzuki: especially speaking to children, you can use the pronouns or titles they would use, or even a relevant third party. He gives an example of a woman calling to her daughter, holding a baby, to sit next to her on the train. She said Mama, koko ni irasshai "Mama, come here!" She was actually taking the point of view of the baby!

[bradrn]

dakedo,

but

ima,

now

[sono

that

kanojo]

she

mo

too

ne,

EM

nanka,

like

kookai,

regret

kono

this

mae

before

tegami

letter

ni

in

kaite

writing

kite

coming

ne,

EM

yappari

as-expected

kookai

regret

shite

doing

ne

EM

However, that she has written [to me] telling [me] that [she] regrets, as expected, that [she] regrets [what she did].

It might be relevant that demonstratives, according to Masayoshi Shibatani (The languages of Japan p. 258), don't work like English ones. They are modifiers with less restrictions than English demonstratives; he gives the example ookina sono issatu no Taroo no hon, lit. "big that-of one of Taro of book". That is, you can't say "big that Taro's book" in English, but it's fine in Japanese. So possibly this is not so much a fact about pronouns as one about demonstratives.

I hadn’t known that about Japanese, so thanks!

However, I had known that this is the case for other languages. (In fact I even put this into one of my conlangs, as I recall.) It would be interesting to look at some more languages with less restrictive demonstratives and see if it holds true for them too. Perhaps I’ll look into this further when I’m less tired.

I'd note though that you can do the same in English: "Hey you, bring us beer!" We can certainly say "You! Tell your story."

Is this really the same thing? In English, you’d call them ‘you’ anyway, if you were speaking to them. So this is the expected way to express a second person vocative. On the other hand, calling them ‘she’ or ‘me’ (as in the Japanese examples) would make the sentence completely incomprehensible.

The boku examples shows (I believe) an interesting phenomenon described by Takao Suzuki: especially speaking to children, you can use the pronouns or titles they would use, or even a relevant third party. He gives an example of a woman calling to her daughter, holding a baby, to sit next to her on the train. She said Mama, koko ni irasshai "Mama, come here!" She was actually taking the point of view of the baby!

Very interesting, thanks! I’m inclined to see this as yet more evidence for Japanese ‘pronouns’ being noun-like. (Or possibly, its nouns being pronoun-like — ultimately it amounts to the same thing.)

[Travis B.]

The boku examples shows (I believe) an interesting phenomenon described by Takao Suzuki: especially speaking to children, you can use the pronouns or titles they would use, or even a relevant third party. He gives an example of a woman calling to her daughter, holding a baby, to sit next to her on the train. She said Mama, koko ni irasshai "Mama, come here!" She was actually taking the point of view of the baby!

Is this weird though? It is normal (to my knowledge at least) when speaking to people to refer to other people from the point of view of the person spoken to. For instance, when speaking to my daughter, I will refer to my mother as "Grandma" even if she is present herself.

[HolyKnowing]

There are reflexive pronouns that refer to the subject of the sentence, best known to me from the older Indo-European languages, like Latin se, but still surviving in several modern languages. Now, the reflexive pronouns in s- are mostly 3rd person, but I believe there are some languages where they can be used for any person, as seen in the Russian and Swedish passives.

Leave it to the Romans to originate the best solutions to outstanding language problems. Comes with running an empire to the ground.

[zompist]

The boku examples shows (I believe) an interesting phenomenon described by Takao Suzuki: especially speaking to children, you can use the pronouns or titles they would use, or even a relevant third party. He gives an example of a woman calling to her daughter, holding a baby, to sit next to her on the train. She said Mama, koko ni irasshai "Mama, come here!" She was actually taking the point of view of the baby!

Is this weird though? It is normal (to my knowledge at least) when speaking to people to refer to other people from the point of view of the person spoken to. For instance, when speaking to my daughter, I will refer to my mother as "Grandma" even if she is present herself.

Yes, we do this sometimes, but Japanese does it more... see Suzuki's book, Words in Context. Note that the mother here was speaking to her own daughter, not to her grandkid.

[dɮ the phoneme]

Regarding Japanese, a few things should possibly be noted:

• The word kanojo, in addition to meaning "she", is also a noun meaning "girlfriend". Likewise kare means "he" but kare(shi) also means boyfriend. The fact that these terms have well established unambiguously nominal usages (that, subjectively, seem to me as or more common in speech than the pronominal usages) is probably pretty important. Even if they are (or started out as, or whatever) true pronouns, we can imagine the nominal usage might drag them in the direction of more nominal syntactic behavior overall. This may be especially true if the noun/pronoun boundary is fuzzy to begin with.
• Japanese tends to use names as a form of second-person address; in English we don't do this. Both kanojo and kare are theoretically third-person pronouns, but bradrn's examples illustrate them being used in an address that looks very second-person to me (in English we can say "hey you" but not "hey she"). In light of all this it seems like even the second/third-person boundary is fuzzy in Japanese. Interesting maybe that this is right above the third-person pronoun/independent nominal boundary in most animacy hierarchies.
• Modifying "pronouns" with adjectives and relative clauses is much more common in Japanese than in English. In English it comes off as weird and stilted to me, whereas in Japanese it sounds pretty normal. But I'm not a native Japanese speaker so there might be a subtlety I'm missing.
• Sort of tangentially related, at least along the "names behave like pronouns" line of discussion: the Japanese plural suffix -tachi can be attached to personal names. I remember once in the context of a group project, my professor called on my group as "Max-san-tachi". I've encountered this usage of the plural occasionally since then.

[Richard W]

Regarding Japanese, a few things should possibly be noted:
...

Several of these phenomena are reminiscent of Thai. I suspect they arise from pronouns being an open class. Not many Thai pronouns seem to be exclusively 2nd or 3rd person.