Yumi - shock, horror ... pronoun discoveries!

[John Lynch]

One of John Burton's recent comments was:

>Mitupela is so commonly shortened to 'mitela' (e.g. 'mitela go nau'), that
>this may warrant the award of 'new pronoun' status. Along with 'tupela', of
>course. Does anyone agree with me?

I wrote a paper in 1979 ... unfortunately never published ... describing
some very common contracttions in TP and looking at the possibility that the
pronouns were being reanalysed. For example, mitupela > mitla and yutupela >
yutla in many dialects or with many speakers (along, of course, with mipla
and yupla in the plural). A strict linguistic analysis would treat these as
mi or yu + t 'dual' or p 'plural' + la 'non-singular' - a bit complex, but
it shows how systems can be reorganised.

The same paper, incidentally, looked at the reduction of 
 1. /bai/ future to /ba/ or just plain /b/ ... e.g. bolikam = bai ol i kam
 2. /long/ to /lo/ or just plain /l/ ... mi go laus 'I'm going home'.

The interesting thing is that all of these were obviously common enough in
the mid 1970s for me to feel that they should be written about ... so they
have been around a long time.

John Lynch