ShibbOleth, I wasn’t talking about capitalizing Du or Dich at the beginning of a sentence. I was talking about capitalizing this pronoun in the middle of a sentence as well. Maybe this isn’t done any more, but it used to be done. Look in some older German literature.
This was one of the changes in our much hated spelling reform of 1996.
Before that both “Du” and “Sie” (and all their forms) were capitalized and many people still do.
Since then only “Sie” is capitalized.
However I refuse to adopt this change. I am not going to be rude just because some committee thinks I should.
Coming from someone who capitalises all her nouns, that’s a bit rich… 
BSquabble writes:
> Can’t really imagine a human culture without some degree of individuation, but
> the Maori might have been the closest before they were exposed to
> ‘civilization’.
This is pretty hard to believe. The Maori are Polynesians. The Polynesians are approximately as closely related as are the speakers of Romance languages. That is, it’s possible to reconstruct a Proto-Polynesian language that was spoken about 500 B.C., and they had broken up into several distinct subgroups in about 500 A.D. Why would this lack of individuation be true of the Maori when it’s not true of other Polynesians?
Actually, I learned that in written correspondence, one should always capitalize all second person nouns and pronouns. So, in a letter it should be:
Ich liebe Dich. (I love you.)
Wo wohnst Du? (Where do you live?)
Wie heisst Du? (What is your name?)
Was ist Ihr Name? (What is your name?)
And no, the last two translations are not typos, it’s just two different ways (the first informal, the second formal) of asking a person’s name.
To continue the hijack…
“Du” was capitalised in written correspondence only (this was abolished with the spelling reform, as kellner pointed out), while “Sie”, the polite form, is also capitalised when writing down a conversation, e.g. in a book. So if a character in a book refers to someone as “Sie”, it is capitalised, but “Du” is only capitalised in letters.
People continue to use the capitalised form of Du in correspondence regardless of the reform, while I never really used it, because it seemed awkward when writing to my friends. And if you´re writing official and business stuff, you use Sie anyway.
Okay, that´s about enough, back to the OP:
I can´t imagine a natural language that has no way of referring to the speaker. I don´t even believe there is one without a personal pronoun for the first person. Even if there is a language that doesn´t have a first person pronoun, it must have some other way of expressing it.
Of course, there are many languages that just don´t require the use of pronouns in the sentence because the person usually becomes clear from the inflection of the verb. Some have been pointed out, others include Spanish, Portuguese, Finnish etc. This does not mean that they have no pronouns, they just aren´t used as often as in English.
How would it be translated? As an I. A translation should be the way you express it in the target language, not a word-for-word translation. If it has the meaning of “I”, that´s what counts.
In the hypothetical case that a language would actually have no way of expressing the first person, neither through a pronoun nor through any other structure, that would be an interesting problem. If you have no way of telling who the sentence is referring to, not even from context, you´re in trouble (that´s why I don´t believe there is such a language).
[hijack]
As an aside: I have pondered a similar problem with Finnish. It has no gender differences in the third person, i.e. there is only one word, meaning both “he” and “she”. Normally you can infer it from context, but I once read a book where the main character was completely ambivalent, it wasn´t even clear whether they were a human being like us, though they had distinctly human features (weird fantasy book, this isn´t really a common problem ). Sometimes they appeared male, sometimes female. How do you translate that? Part of the charm of the book is that you can´t tell. So choosing either “he” or “she” would make it a completely different book. “It” would not be human enough, you would think of an animal, a child, some weird entity. But it isn´t that. It is a human being. The author just doesn´t tell us whether it´s male or female.
In English you can get around that by using “they”, but only for a while. Reading an entire book which only used “they” would be tiring. Also, it would mean that the author herself doesn´t now the gender of this person. She does, she just doesn´t tell us.
[/hijack]
In a language that has no written form, there is always context. To people you know, you would refer to yourself using your name. To people who don’t know your name, you could point at yourself while saying your name or “this person”.
I can’t provide a cite, but I’m pretty sure there are languages that do this. There are definitely languages that do not have pronouns.
Yup, awldune, that´s what I mean. Because there is always some context, be it textual or situational, you should always be able to tell whether the speaker is speaking of himself or of someone else.
Thus, there may be languages without first person pronouns (or any at all. I am absolutely prepared to believe this, it´s not inconceivable - but has anyone got any examples?), but I do not think that it is possible to have a language without a first person.
If pointing at yourself and saying “this person” is using the first person, then a language without a first person is not plausible. You’re talking about a language where it is not possible to refer to yourself, even through context (as opposed to a language with no overt first person inflection/pronoun). The only way it would actually be impossible to refer to yourself is if you truly had no concept of self, which is more a question of cognitive psych than of language.
As for examples of a language without pronouns, I definitely remember reading about some for a linguistics class, but I don’t remember what they were. Most likely they were obscure polynesian/amerindian/african languages.
Japanese is much the same. There are words for she and he but they’re considered rude and not used very often. There’s a manga called Wish that’s a love story between a human man and a male but effeminate angel. When it was translated into English, the translator made the decision to call the angel “she”. Legions of fans were outraged…
The Jamaican patois used by Rastafarians is another language that uses only a first person…and the idea IS that this is indicative of the unity between people.
Anyone who’s interested can do the research, but the pronoun we are talking about is “I & I”.
Assuming a natural, rather than artificially constructed, language, why would such a thing evolve without a first-person pronoun? It seems like the most primitive things any organism wants to get across is its own wants and needs. “Me hungry” “This is my territory” “Me want sex”, and so on.
I would assume that the first person case is the first to evolve in any linguistic situation. My very vague memory of deaf children who were forced to create their own languages (i.e. isolated from other deaf people) tends to confirm this. Do any linguists out there know for sure?
mischievous
In the old film The Savage Innocents it was suggested that the Inuit people generally refer to themselves in the third person. For instance, wishing to say that he is pleased, Anthony Quinn says “a man is very happy”. Can anyone verify that this is customary in their language and, if so, if this is an invariable custom?
Only used in informal conversation though. In informal conversation you leave out everything but the verbs and objects pretty much, and sometimes you don’t even use the objects. It might seem weird, but it’s really not difficult to understand at all. Happens in English too, for example
A: Hungry?
B: Ate.
A: Mall?
B: Boooo-ring.
A: Movie?
B: Sure.
Same with Japanese, it’s the, er, whatsitcalled, “I’m currently doing it” tense of “to love”, words seem to fail me now -_-;. In that way and many others Japanese and Korean are very similar.
But with regard to using “I” in normal speech, I don’t believe Korean, Japanese or Chinese has a rule regarding that. On the other hand, using the pronoun “you” in speech is fairly impolite in any formal situation and some non-formal situations in Japanese and Chinese. You should always address the person by their title/name/position (i.e. Mom, Professor, Teacher, Servicepeople have their own colloquial titles depending on the region).
Japanese and Korean grammar have many similarities but Chinese languages are completely different. Chinese is much closer to English than it is to Japanese, structurally. As such, you do use first person pronouns quite a lot. In Mandarin, “I love you” comes out as “wo ai ni”. “Wo”=I, “ai”=love, “ni”=you. Compare with the Japanese “ai shite iru” where “ai”=love and “shite iru” is the present progressive form of “to do”.
Mandarin has a more polite second person pronoun, “nin”. It corresonds roughly to French “vous”, or Spanish “usted”, or Russian “vi”. “Wo ai nin” doesn’t translate nicely into English, but the French “je vous aime” comes close.
There is a number of Inuit languages, but I found this interesting article on Inuktitut yesterday. In the section “The nature of the Inuktitut language” you will find several examples that show that there is indeed a way of expressing the first person. It looks to me like Inuktitut indeed has no personal pronouns - not as such, not as stand-alone words, but rather as suffixes or infixes. But it definitely does have a first person.
Yes, awldune, that´s what I mean.
I´m not quite sure whether the OP meant a language without a grammatical first person or any at all (somehow that Nietzsche reference makes me think they meant the latter). Inconceivable, because surely every human culture has some degree of self-awareness.
A language without a grammatical first person would likely not be a written language - at least I assume that some way of indicating the person would develop, even if it were only writing “the author thinks…” or something like that.
And you would always translate it as “I”, because you translate meaning, not words.
I hate to keep on bring up Japanese, but that’s something young people do a lot here. They get rid of all personal pronouns and just use names instead, even for the first person. In English, “I’ll send you an e-mail” would come out as “jovan will send slipster an e-mail.” However, since pronouns aren’t used that often in the first place, and this usage does have some stylistic basis, it’s not as jarring.
What exactly makes you think that Maori doesn’t have a first person pronoun? As has been said, it does it is “ahau” or “au” (which is what it is in several other polynesian languages. This is related to the Malay and Tagalog words for “i” - aku, ako. And because these language all do not specify person or gender in verbs, it is imperative that you use the pronouns.
And why would the Maori have the least "individualization? Why is it that non-western peoples always get this mystical hippie commune type label applied to them?