2 Responses to “Indefinite Pronouns”

1. Keith Pardee Says:
   November 28th, 2009 at 6:56 pm

   This one is really interesting. Is there some way though to get a better understanding of the mixed and special languages? Do we have any way of knowing whether the special words are mutated forms of \what\ or \thing\, or have their histories become too obscured? What about the mixed languages? Is there any way of knowing if one of the forms was more original and the other form was borrowed? It looks from the map that the special forms are more intermixed with the \what\ languages, but that’s really not enough to go on. Having this sort of extra information would really help to make even more sense of the map.

   Also, I can’t get a feel for the Italic languages or the Germanic. What type of language was Latin? And as for the Germanic languages, was English influenced by French, or was German influenced by Baltic/Slavic? If the \thing\ strategy is inherent to the Italic languages but not the Germanic, is it unreasonable to suppose that there might have been an Afro-Asiatic substratum in Italy?

2. Martin Haspelmath Says:
   November 30th, 2009 at 2:22 pm

   Yes, as is always the case with WALS maps, more information would be nice. For some addition information, you can look at Haspelmath (1997) (Indefinite pronouns, OUP), but it’s not coded in the current database. The special forms sometimes do derive from interrogative-based forms (e.g. Spanish algo ’something’ from Latin ali-quod), but it is not always apparent what their origin is.

   Latin clearly had interrogative-based indefinites, but the connection between interrogatives and indefinites gradually got lost in the Romance languages, and ‘thing’ words became more prominent. The latter remind one of African languages, but what the historical connection might be is quite unclear.

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