Pronouns

At this point, if you've decided to go deeper into constucting a workable language, not just a few stray phrases, you need to start making some serious choices that will affect how the language will work in terms of grammar and equally in terms of how efficient your vocabulary will be.

No matter how many vowels and consonants you have chosen, and how many consonant clusters you've decided to accept, there is a mathematical limit to the number of individual word-roots possible of a given length. Just starting out, it will seem that you can make everything as simple, regular and unambiguous as you please and never have to worry about running out of new words you can create to expand your vocabulary. Such is the case as long as you don't attempt to create literature (short stories, poetry, essays or longer works) or attempt to translate existing works of literature into your own language.

There is a reason that on any page of an English dictionary you find words with multiple meanings. These mulitple meanings help keep words short in our language and help provide space for new terms within the phonology. It also helps make the language difficult to learn. The same is true of having grammatical gender. Theoretically you can nearly triple the number of word roots, by having nouns with three genders (masculine, feminine and neutrar) instead of none. Where the genders of the nouns are fairly obvious from the form of the word as in Spanish or Russian, learning to handle gender isn't difficult. In a language like German where the gender of many, many nouns is unpredictable from their forms, handling gender can be an endless battle.

You can see vocabulary problems more easily in languages with limited numbers of possible syllables like Mandarin or Hawaiian. In Mandarin there are many spoken words with several meanings dispite the fact that pitch stress allows Mandarin to quadruple the number of possible word roots. In Hawaiian and other Polynesian languages. the words are mostly short but the phrases and sentences to express many things can be quite long, because the number of short word-roots is very limited.

Basically I'm saying that for most purposes you will not have to worry about the number of word roots you are using, but the more extensive your language's vocabulary becomes the more you may find it necessary to introduce complications which will make your language less concise, less regular and less easy to learn than you hoped.

I recommend starting your vocabulary with pronouns. The function of pronouns need not always be separate words. In Navajo and the artificial language Klingon the pronouns are very often incorporated into the verbs as suffixes, instead of I saw him and He heard me you have something like Isawhim and Heheardme, where the forms of 'I', 'he', 'me' and 'him' might possibily change to make different classes of verbs (increasing the number of possible word-roots). Spanish has this in a more limited sense with words like verlo and verla where only the object is part of the word. If you are comfortable with this kind of suffixes then by all means try it.

One thing that immediately comes up when discussing pronouns is the Latin concepts of person and number. Just about any language taught to English speaking student will have pronouns and often verbs forms explained in terms of first person singular, third person plural and so on. Latin concepts of grammar are not the only way of looking at things and sometimes they lead us far astray. But for what we think of as person pronouns, Latin grammar does give a useful frame work, which we need not copy too rigidly.

We don't need to fill in every slot in the Latin frame work with a separate distinct word. In English we use the personal pronouns I, we, you, he, she, it, they. If we are being complete we might include thou but for 95% of all English speakers that's a relic of the past. Most of us use the word you for both second person singular and plural, and don't feel a teensy bit guilty about it. The point is that falling together of forms is a normal part of the history of real languages though it horrifies purists. There is no reason you need to be a purist for your own language, nor any reason you need avoid being one. It's your choice.

Surprisingly many natural languages have dual forms of nouns and the personal pronouns, besides singular and plural. You can use the dual or not as you wish.

Not every language has words to directly translate each of our personal pronouns and your language may have more personal pronouns than English or fewer. Very many languages (Finnish, Turkish, Navajo, etc.) with no history of grammatical gender do not have pronouns to distinguish between he and she. Many of those also don't distinguish between he/she and it. Mandarin distinguishes between all three of them in modern writing, but not in speech! Finnish distinguishes it from he/she and even has a separate they for things. From what I've read Samoan avoids using a pronoun for it altogehter.

For my own language I kept he, she, and it, though I have no grammatic gender. It just seemed a good way to make sentences clear without extra verbiage. However I did introduce two personal pronouns, which I don't know exist in any natural language. The first is a different we.
Have you ever a misunderstanding like this?
We are going to the movies tonight.
Oh, no *we* are not. I'm busy.
Uhm, I meant my family and I.

I have in my language an 'exclusive' we which excludes the intended listener as well as an 'inclusive' we which includes the intended listener. This is very helpful at times especially in writing. I'm not a native user of the concept so I do have to think which 'we' to use and sometimes make mistakes.

Much easier to remember to use is my form of a second it. I use one it only for concrete touchable objects, the other for abstract concepts. Obviously, it's not a necessary distinction. But I have found that the it for concepts can often be left out of some constructions entirely or used for emphasis. It's another feature I'm glad I have.