Amerind Personal Pronouns: A Second Opinion

Abstract

There is now, surprisingly, a sizeable literature on pronouns in Native American languages and what their historical significance may be (references cited in N&P 1996 and Campbell 1994). Nichols & Peterson 1996 (henceforth Nichols and Peterson) is significant both for what it reveals about these pronouns and for the questions it raises about how they might be explained. Nichols and Peterson investigate the distribution of the pronoun pattern with n ‘first person’ and m ‘second person’ and assert that it is limited essentially to certain western American Indian languages and to Austronesian languages of northern New Guinea, based on ‘a moderately large sample of the world's languages’ (337), largely copied from Nichols 1992. They argue that this distribution is no accident, but rather is ‘a single historical development … though we cannot determine the exact nature of the shared history (common descent? areal affinity? etc.), it can be given a chronology and a geography and tied in to a bigger picture of circumpacific migration’ (337). The interpretation of this single historical development, however, is obscured in the discussion. My purpose here is to offer a different interpretation of their findings and thus hopefully to contribute to greater understanding of the role of pronouns in comparative linguistics in general. N&P contributes a number of significant insights concerning criteria for genetic relatedness. The reinterpretation offered here does not concern these, but rather only their more specific claims about the geographical distribution of pronoun patterns and how they are to be understood.

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