Ah, actually I just meant that many languages seem to not have a separate word for "it". I was looking at some 30 languages, and there was like maybe one other than English that had one. Either they use demonstratives instead of 3rd person pronouns like you mentioned, or they just lack an inanimate 3rd person pronoun and use a demonstrative instead, or "it" is not distinguished from "he" or "she".bradrn wrote: ↑Mon Feb 08, 2021 6:24 pm Where did you see this claim? Bhat (2004) confirms it, but it’s hardly ‘most languages’: ‘That study [sampling 255 languages from WALS] indicated that two-person languages [i.e. ‘that’=‘it’] slightly outnumber three-person languages [i.e. ‘that’≠‘it’]: It appears to be possible to regard 126 of these languages as two-person languages, and only 99 as three-person languages.’
Actually, one important reason for distinguishing "it" from "that" in this conlang is that in relative clauses (that aren't really relative clauses) one of the words refers to the subject and the other one for anything else, which is inanimate (or non-human).
It happens to be so that if I were to use some derivational trick, following the "logic of this conlang", I would have to form "it" as "that thing". So I would end up with yet another "that". I also want "it" to be a monosyllabic word because it would be so common.