M-T pronouns: Difference between revisions

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "M-T pronouns" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (June 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Across many languages of northern Eurasia, the personal pronouns have a pattern of an m or m-like consonant (abbreviated 'M') in the first person singular ('1sg'), and a t or t-like consonant (abbreviated 'T') in the second person singular ('2sg'). This is commonly called the M-T pronoun pattern. The first is usually a nasal /m/, though some languages have a non-nasal /b/; the second is a non-nasal coronal consonant such as /t, d, t͜ʃ, s/, all of which may derive historically from *t.^[1][2][3] This was recently the case in English, for example, with me, my, mine in 1sg and thou, thee, thine in 2sg. The M-T pattern has been used as an argument for several proposed long-distance language families, such as the Nostratic hypothesis, that include Indo-European as a subordinate branch; Nostratic has even been called 'Mitian' after these pronouns.^[4][3]

A sporadic M-T pattern is to be expected around the world just by chance; given that personal pronouns typically use only a small subset of the consonants available in a language, the likelihood of chance resemblance is significant.^{[citation needed]} An M-T pattern occurs in non-Eurasian languages such as Fulani and Grebo in West Africa, Usan and Salt-Yui in New Guinea, and Miwok and Lakota in North America.^[1] However, the frequency is not statistically significant, while the incidence in northern Eurasia is much higher than would be expected by chance, suggesting to many historical linguistics over the years that it may be evidence that the languages with this pattern are related. Note however that even if some of the language families listed below do prove to be related (such as Indo-European and Uralic or the Altaic families), that doesn't mean that all Eurasian families with an M-T pattern belong to that larger family: some chance occurrence in Eurasia would be no more statistically significant than it is elsewhere in the world.^{[citation needed]}

Language families with an M-T pattern

An M-T pattern is found in languages of the Indo-European, Uralic, Yukaghir, Chukchi–Kamchatkan, Kartvelian, Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic language families of Eurasia, these last three constituting the core of the Altaic hypothesis. More importantly, it is reconstructed for the ancestral proto-languages of these families, which is not the case for where the pattern has been noticed outside of Eurasia.^{[citation needed]}

Note that that most Indo-European languages of Europe do not have an 'M' form in the nominative case, using instead a form related to English I and Latin ego, an irregularity tracing back to Proto-Indo-European. These forms are included for completeness in the table below but are set off in parentheses. Proto-Turkic, Proto-Mongolic and Proto-Tungusic have a 1sg pronoun in *b, while the occurrence of /m/ in many of their daughter languages are the result of later sound changes.^[3] Proponents of a long-range relation of Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic with other language families of northern Eurasia thus have to posit ad hoc an irregular sound change from *m to *b for these pronouns in order to claim that they are related to their counterparts in Proto-Uralic, Proto-Indo-European etc.^[5]

A historical sound change of *ti → *či → *si is quite common, occurring independently in Greek, Proto-Finnic and likely also in Proto-Mongolic. For those who believe that the correspondences below are not simply coincidental, one must posit that the same change happened in Turkic, Tungusic and Kartvelian.^{[citation needed]}

Pronominal suffixes in the table (marked by a hyphen) may be object suffixes on a verb or possessive suffixes on a noun, depending on the language.^[1]

Plural forms are ignored. Some are closer to the M-T pattern than the singular is, for example Proto-Chukotko-Kamchatkan *muri 'we' and *turi 'you'. However, doubling the number of pronouns to be considered in this way increases the possibility of coincidental resemblance, and decreases the likelihood that the resulting pattern is significant.^{[citation needed]}

See also

• N-M pronouns, a similar pattern in North America and sporadically elsewhere

References

External links

• M-T Pronouns (also N-M Pronouns) at the World Atlas of Language Structures Online.