Gevey pronouns

Pronouns are (small) words that can represent an object in a clause. There are two groups of pronoun in Gevey:

• Personal pronouns
• Functional pronouns

Personal Pronouns

Personal pronouns are used to identify the self and other people within a group. In addition, they can also be used to replace an object in a clause, where that object has already been introduced into the conversation or narrative. Personal pronouns take account of an object's status, gender, number and person. A fifth distinction - station - has become obsolete, but this distinction informs which personal pronouns are used with which speaking register.

There are three persons in Gevey:

• First person - ie self (I, we)
• Second person - ie someone directly addressed (thou, you)
• Third person - ie someone referred to (he, she, it, they)

Gevey used to employ different personal pronouns to indicate the relative social status of the people involved in a conversation - this was a feature of old Vreski language from which all the Balhan languages are descended. While the status system has fallen out of use in Gevey, some of the pronouns associated with it have been retained. For example, Gevey has three different first person singular personal pronouns, each of which is used in a different register of speech:

• people involved in more formal conversations will use 'tce'
• in more informal conversations (with close friends and family) people will use 'édle'
• the default pronoun, for more general situations, is 'te'

This all means that there are far more personal pronouns in Gevey than there are in languages such as Ramajal.

The last example in the table is the interrogative personal pronoun (who? what?). Examples on using interrogative pronouns can be found at the end of this page.

In addition to the normal grammatical cases a noun may have, personal pronouns can take a further three grammatical cases unique to them. These are:

• Reflexive exclusive case - reflexive personal pronouns are used to show that an object is both the subject and the direct object of a principle verb in a clause.
• Reflexive inclusive case - similar to the more normal reflexive exclusive case, but only found in paucal and plural pronouns. For example: you talk to each other, we considered between us, they played among themselves.
• Predicate case - predicate personal pronouns are used to replace a subject noun and a principle verb, or even an entire clause or sentence. This case is rapidly falling out of favour in many dialects.

Declension of Personal Pronouns

The declension of personal pronouns is, to a large extent, regular. The appropriate suffix (which changes according to the personal pronoun's case and status) is simply added to the personal pronoun stem:

There are some irregularities to the above outlined model, however. Irregular personal pronouns occur in the nominitive case. The full declension of the above personal pronouns in the nominative case is given below, for completeness:

Some care needs to be taken when using the interrogative personal pronoun, as the choice of status given to the word can have implications for the question being asked. In general, use the simple status 'gze' if at all unsure about which status should be applied to the word.

Pronoun compounds

In general, pronouns do not form compound words. The one exception to this rule are compounds formed with the preposition 'tcis-' (which in the systemic case means for, with reference to). 'Tcistes' can be translated along the lines of for me or with reference to me; tcizdes, tciskes and tcises have similar translations.

These compounds are often used as interjections (words that stand outside the normal rules of grammar) placed before certain predicate conjunctions to clarify their meaning. More information on the use of predicate conjunctions can be found on the conjunctions page of this website.

Functional Pronouns

The second group of pronouns used in Gevey are the so called functional pronouns (also known as indefinite pronouns). There are in fact two groups of functional pronoun: locative pronouns and demonstrative pronouns.

In some ways, functional pronouns act like genitive objects or pronouns in that they will generally follow the word they are acting on (and be placed between an object and its dissociated complex). In the above table, the personal pronoun can be replaced by a different personal pronoun, or a normal object - tusre kelaa? ke valau (Which dog? That one over there).

In addition to the locative and demonstrative pronouns, Gevey also employs locative and demonstrative objects. These objects are compound words, and should not be confused with their related pronouns.

Using pronouns

Gevey pronouns are easy to use - they simply replace the object in the sentence. The one thing to remember when using pronouns is that they tend to represent 'old news' (in other words they will tend to represent the topic of the clause) and thus will usually follow the main verb; whereas nouns tend to be used when they represent 'new news' (the comment part of the clause), which tends to precede the main verb in Gevey. Further information on topic and comment can be found on the focus and word order webpage of this grammar.