Hypothetical grammar related to pronouns

[Vir Docilis]

What do you say about having forms marking persons on normal nouns:

Mom, I want to play! - (mom is in second person)
Mom is really busy right now. - (mom is in first person)
But dad said that I could. - (dad is in third person)

When I thought about this, I concluded that vocative is always in second person. And that in most cases, you are actually using the third person form.

In addition to this, I figured that you could have a pronoun in-between second person and third person. This form is used in cases like this:

Have Steven already taken a cake? (When Steven is present. Both Steven and the others may answer.)
Oh, I've forgotten to tell him / you but he / you cannot eat cake today. (Telling this to both the person he's talking about and the person asking the question).

Otherwise you would have to choose between speaking to the person himself (excluding the others) or the others (excluding him).

[lx]

Have Steven already taken a cake? (When Steven is present. Both Steven and the others may answer.)
Oh, I've forgotten to tell him / you but he / you cannot eat cake today. (Telling this to both the person he's talking about and the person asking the question).

I don't really understand this part. The "Have Steven already...?" just feels so wrong to me because of being a native English speaker that I can't figure out what you intend it to mean. In the second example, you mention that there might be some problem with pronouns where you can't just address "Steven" along with everyone else, but I'd think using a second person plural would solve that problem anyway. Everyone is being addressed and everyone can answer.

In answer to the wider question as to what we might say about this feature existing, the main question is whether it is warranted. I noticed in your first post you said you were making a conlang so I assume this is related to that, otherwise it'd only exist if speakers felt it worked or had a sufficiently accepted tradition of use. I'd hesitate to say that words needed more explicit grammatical functionality than necessary. Context takes care of a lot of issues and I don't see how grammatical role-marking would add a tremendous amount (measured against the costs of having to implement such features on all nouns all of the time). I must admit I don't understand the desire to create conlangs so that probably affects my response (but it's great to see people interested in it!)

[Daniel]

I'm not familiar with any languages that do this either. There are certainly some interesting nominal inflections such as tense marking (roughly like ex-wife or future-leader or president-elect) but the purpose of pronouns is to replace nouns. So they have number to show participants I'm the conversation rather than using full nouns when it isn't contextually necessary, and they have person and gender information to clarify the referent-- not needed on full noun phrases usually.

[jkpate]

What do you say about having forms marking persons on normal nouns:

Mom, I want to play! - (mom is in second person)
Mom is really busy right now. - (mom is in first person)
But dad said that I could. - (dad is in third person)

Are you glossing another language? If those examples are English, the first one is not in any person (since it has no verb to agree with), and the second and third are both unambiguously third person. A word does not become `second person' simply because it refers to the person you are talking to.

[Vir Docilis]

I don't really understand this part. The "Have Steven already...?" just feels so wrong to me because of being a native English speaker that I can't figure out what you intend it to mean.

In Sweden you take your piece of the cake on your own, as we don't serve food. Also we don't usually talk about pieces of cake but say literally "he took a cake", which might sound stupid in English. So this is a question whither the Steven has taken his part of the cake or not. So this is what might have happened:

Person A saw everyone but Steven take a piece of the cake the mother had cooked for everyone. So the conclusion is that Steven could have either chosen take the cake now or to take it later. Person A don't want to take too much of the cake, and needs to know whither the cake should be divided in two or if he can take a bit more (because he is greedy).

So person A needs to ask Steven if he has taken. But this Steven has a routine of taking the dessert later when he is not in the mood for it. And if person A asked Steven, he might be a bit naggy and ruin Steven's mood. That's why person A normally prefers asking the others about this matter, before asking Steven. And as the others has seen him eating, they probably know the answer to his question. But there is an unwritten rule to speak to a person present in the room first when it concerns the person, so person A also wants to make it clear that he is not ignoring Steven. But in the end our grammar has no such form so he ends saying: "Has Steven already taken his part of the cake?" (corrected).

This is based on my own experiences, for I'm always last one finishing eating in my family. As an example question there seems to have been too little information, though. Also one other thing I was not thinking about at the moment when I was writing the example is that you may count the plates and choose not to ask this question. I actually do this quite often. But when you eat something which you do not eat on a plate, you have to ask. Also I think I may ask instead of looking at the plates as it might be a bit sneaky.

[Vir Docilis]

...but the purpose of pronouns is to replace nouns.

I agree to you on this part completely. I've tried using this grammar, and as you say having such a grammar would not really serve any real purpose. However, in languages that use titles such as Japanese, I think this distinction might help a bit, especially the distinction between second and third person.

Then, I really love this grammar nevertheless! Having this might give way to a new way of expression. The teacher may say refer to himself as a teacher, the policeman himself as a policeman and so on. Think about having books written in this! It would be funny! Now, that's why I included this to my own language.

[Vir Docilis]

Are you glossing another language? If those examples are English, the first one is not in any person (since it has no verb to agree with), and the second and third are both unambiguously third person. A word does not become `second person' simply because it refers to the person you are talking to.

Haha. Then we should really say: "Mother am busy right now"! The grammatical feature is from my own language. I made an example in English because I thought that writing in my own language might be feeling a bit showy, especially since I'm new here. The other reason was that I have very few words in my own language. In this case, I thought it would be practical to give an example in English, as people might easier relate to it. After all, we all have heard our mothers talk about themselves as "mom" and called our mother "mom".

[freknu]

Are you glossing another language? If those examples are English, the first one is not in any person (since it has no verb to agree with), and the second and third are both unambiguously third person. A word does not become `second person' simply because it refers to the person you are talking to.

Haha. Then we should really say: "Mother am busy right now"!

Eh, what? "am" is the first person singular copula. "Mom" is third person.

I am busy — (no equivalent)
you are busy — (no equivalent)
s/he/it is busy — mom is busy
we are busy — us moms are busy
you are busy — you moms are busy
they are busy — moms are busy

Third person.

[Vir Docilis]

Are you glossing another language? If those examples are English, the first one is not in any person (since it has no verb to agree with), and the second and third are both unambiguously third person. A word does not become `second person' simply because it refers to the person you are talking to.

Haha. Then we should really say: "Mother am busy right now"!

Eh, what? "am" is the first person singular copula. "Mom" is third person.

I am busy — (no equivalent)
you are busy — (no equivalent)
s/he/it is busy — mom is busy
we are busy — us moms are busy
you are busy — you moms are busy
they are busy — moms are busy

Third person.

It's a joke! Of course you don't say: "Mom am busy"! The point is, the grammatical person and the actual person seems to be different here! For example, if I were the mother, and were talking to my child, I'm a first person, as I'm talking about myself:

Mom needs some time alone right now. (I'm talking about myself)

In second person we prefer using vocative instead. However as vocative always addresses the listener it's actual person is second person:

Mom, I want to play! (The child is referring to me. I'm the listener.)

So that leaves the actual third person to be in every case we refer to someone who isn't us and who isn't the person(s) we are talking to.

But dad always plays with me! (but now the child is referring to someone else)

The grammar I've showed you here is only available for two nouns "mom" and "dad", and names and titles. But then we don't refer to ourselves by our name do we? Like this:

Vir likes grammar. (I'm refering to myself)

But in Japan, it would seem that female's may actually do this because they think it's cute.

So if we had these distinctions we might actually conjugate the verbs according to this. That was what I was getting at. One thing I believe will never change though is the usage of the third person to speak in an indirect manner when you are trying to hide your own personality:

I heard someone was creating a language.
He wouldn't be go by the name Vir Docilis at the forum would he? (I'm speaking)

Here the speaker wants to pretend that the person he is talking about is not himself so he's using third person. As I'm saying, I'm not talking about the grammatical person here, but rather the actual person. But even if we look at this from the grammatical person perpective: "What happens when you change the nouns in the examples to pronouns?". The answer is, that they change into the persons I'm talking about. For example:

Mom needs some time alone right now. -> I need some time alone right now.

My conclusion is that the grammatical persons in our languages are irregular. I'm putting suffixes after the nouns in my language, making this completely regular, meaning that when you change the nouns into pronouns, they will be similar to the pronouns. Like this:

Mom(I) needs some time alone right now. -> I need some time alone right now.

[freknu]

It's a joke! Of course you don't say: "Mom am busy"! The point is, the grammatical person and the actual person seems to be different here! For example, if I were the mother, and were talking to my child, I'm a first person, as I'm talking about myself:

Mom needs some time alone right now. (I'm talking about myself)

That's called talking in third person.

In second person we prefer using vocative instead. However as vocative always addresses the listener it's actual person is second person:

Mom, I want to play! (The child is referring to me. I'm the listener.)

Vocative is the nominal inflection showing the object being address and as such does not have person.

One way to look at it is that because vocative essentially tells who should listen to what you are saying it is actually not "grammatical" as such, essentially metagrammatical.

"I want to play" is the actual grammatical sentence, whereas "mom" is the metagrammatical segment identifying whom you are talking to, in a sense similar to a script where it says:

[Ash] "Come get some!"

"Ash" is telling you who is saying something, and the line is telling you what they are saying. Vocative is a similar construct, except telling you whom the line is addressed to.

[Old woman] [to Ash] "I'll swallow your soul!"
[Ash] [to old woman] "Come get some!

[addresser] [addressee] content

[Daniel]

Vocative is the nominal inflection showing the object being address and as such does not have person.

This is actually an exception: Vocative is essentially second-person case.
As for everything else I'm just as confused as you are about why any of this would be needed, but vocative itself is already serving that purpose.

[freknu]

Vocative is the nominal inflection showing the object being address and as such does not have person.

This is actually an exception: Vocative is essentially second-person case.

Oh.

[Daniel]

To be clear: I've never actually seen it referred to in that way, but that's exactly what vocative encodes.

[Vir Docilis]

Lastly I wanted to point out that Japanese does not always use vocative when referring to a listener:

Shizuka-san ha dou omoimasu ka? - What does Shizuka think?

In this sentence, you may either be addressing the listener or someone else. In Japanese you don't generally address a person as you. There are some words meaning you, but the general rule is to address someone by name. So for example in anime, you may see woman getting annoyed at men not calling them by name (it feels as if the person did not know you). So in the end you always speaking in third person, as the expression goes. But I'd say you are using the same grammar for both second and third person, making the sentences ambiguous. So cultural values are also important when it comes to this.

But then Japanese also has vocative, which does give some clarity:

Shizuka-san, sore ha nan desu ka? - Shizuka-san, what is that?

But I think that the distinction does help anyway, because vocative is used more when you are trying to get someone's attention, and has some special nuances.

[Daniel]

I don't think that's a vocative in the narrow sense. It's sort of like English "Mr."