LINGUIST List 5.259

Sun 06 Mar 1994

Sum: Divine Pronouns

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Mari Olsen, Sum: Divine pronouns

In re: my request for "divine pronouns" (5.178) Linda
Coleman (LC22umail.umd.edu) reminded me that the
people at the Summer institute of Linguistics would "have
the info if anyone did." I'm still waiting to hear from an SIL
person...

I received information regarding Chalcatongo Mixtec from
Monica Macaulay (macaulaysage.cc.purdue.edu):

Well, Chalcatongo Mixtec has a pronoun sort of like
what you describe. It's a pronominal enclitic, =zVa
(using "zV" for voiced palatal fricative), which I gloss
as "supernatural." It can be used for God and Jesus,
but also for a priest, a nun, and, interestingly, the
devil.

regarding Chinese from Joyce Tang Boyland
(jtangcogsci.berkeley.edu):

Chinese has only one pronoun, to be used for
whatever gender, incl. inanimate. However
sometimes the characters are written differently, with
a "spirit" radical on the left, for example, when it
refers to God. It's pronounced ta- (high level tone).

Picus Sizhi Ding (dinplingfac.anu.edu.au)

Although there is only a third person singular
pronoun in spoken Chinese, (ta in Mandarin), the
form can be written differently in such a way that
gender is signified. There are three more forms: one
for animals, one for inanimate, and one for god. The
divine form seems to be used in Christian materials
rather than in Buddhist stories. Like the characters for
different gender, it is most likely a recent invent.
That's my Chinese impression.

and Karen S. Chung (karchungccms.ntu.edu.tw):

 Sometime early in this century, a whole slew of
custom-made third person singular pronominal
forms began to appear in standard Chinese--but*only*
in the written form, since all are pronounced the
same, i.e. Chinese does not distinguish gender or
animacy in third person singular pronouns. But
mainly due to influence from Western languages via
the process of translation into Chinese, forms were
created for females ('she'), inanimates('it'), animals,
and deities. Divine pronouns are used mainly in
Christian writings (e.g. the Bible and hymns), and
sometimes for local gods. But no one really takes any
of these written variants seriously--the original _ta_
does fine for all, or otherwise pronominal reference,
especially to inanimates, is simply avoided.

...[since] the Chinese pronouns exist only in the
written form, so the English convention of
capitalizing any nominal reference to God is not that
different from the Chinese character used, since it
involves only changing the 'human' radical of the
_ta_ pronoun to a 'deity' radical; the phonetic stays
the same. There is however, a more regular way of
showing respect in written Chinese that is usually
reserved for Sun Yat-sen, the Republic of China's
'Father of the Country', and sometimes for Chiang
Kai-shek in propaganda writings at least: they leave
one or two blank spaces before their name. That's
probably closer to the use of capitalized English
pronouns. I can't think of any English equivalent for
the 'animal' pronoun though, except for hestitation
about which of the three available to use; usually 'he'
or 'she' if the gender is known, otherwise 'it'.

I heard from Aaron (BROADWELL GEORGE AARON,
gb661csc.albany.edu) on Chocho:

In Jorge Suarez's 1983 book <The Mesoamerican
Indian languages>, he lists Chocho as having a
separate "devotional" pronoun. My guess from this is
that the pronoun is appropriately used for the divine,
though perhaps that includes saints, angels, etc. as
well as God. [Chocho is an Otomanguean language,
spoken (I think) in Oaxaca.]

and from R. M. Chandler-Burns (rchandlrccr.dsi.uanl.mx)
on Spanish:

In the Spanish speaking world one talks to God, Jesus,
the Virgen Maria and the saints in the informal
second person singular. Like talking to your brother
or sister...TU/TUYO (thou/thine,thy, etc.). ...What is
really different in the Spanish speaking world is that
one can use the diminutive with God, Jesus and the
Virgin Mary: Diosito, virgencita, etc. and the English
speaking world would hardly think of talking to the
deity in those terms. It has to have minimizing
categories to be able to deal with them.

on Persian and Islam from Reza Hashema Gask
(gaskccl.umist.ac.uk):

Though highly respecting God (or "Khoda" or "Allah"
the Persian and Arabic equivalents, respectively),
Muslims in general, and Iranians in particular refer to
God with 2nd person gender-neutral singular
pronoun "to", which corresponds to English
"you"...pronouns of respect addressing people of
prestige and divine ones do exist in Persian. They are,
nonetheless, not used with respect to Allah...due to
the Islamic teachings saying that Allah is one's most
intimate friend; none of the intimate participants of a
friendly environment likes to be, or sound,"pedantic".

...[this] applies to "direct speech" or "confession-like"
talking with God. There is also the "gender-neutral"
but "person-restricted" 3rd person singular pronoun
"oo" which is used for indirect reference to God
Almighty. This corresponds to English 3rd person
singular pronoun, except that it is neutral with respect
to the gender color which is marked in English "HE".

and regarding the Quaker use of thee/thou from Sonja
Launspach (T720026UNIVSCVM.CSD.SCAROLINA.EDU):

...the use of the informal pronouns is not restricted to
God , but is generally used in group, rather than a
generational thing altho they are used less and less in
the Meetings I've attended.

Steven Schaufele (fcoswsnytud.hu) offers a creative
solution for English, borrowing from Finnish:

But i have for many years now been productively
using a set of gender-neutral 3rd-person pronouns of
my own coinage (well, creative borrowing from
Finnish, really): the stem is 'hann' (rhymes with the
name of the character in Star Wars -- there's an
umlaut in the Finnish original -- cliticizes to a syllabic
/n/, with a good old Germanic -s for the
possessive)...in a lot of circumstances in which i'm
referring to a person whose gender is unknown or
irrelevant and for whatever reason the generic plural
doesn't fit. I posted some things to LINGUIST about
this last summer, if i remember correctly.

I use 'Hann' in church to refer to the Trinity as a
Whole and to the First Member Thereof. Since the
Second Member is historically male i have no qualms
about using traditional masculine pronouns in
referring to Him. For the Paraclete i've revived a
first-century minority practice of using feminine
pronouns. Several members of my home parish in
Champaign have picked up with delight on my habit
of saying in the Creed, 'With the Father and the Son
She is is worshipped and glorified; She has spoken
through the prophets', or, 'All praise and thanks to
God / The Father now be given, / The Son, and Her
Who reigns / With Them in highest Heaven' (note:
use of 'Them' to refer to Members of the Trinity
severally....) Note however that for me this is
just an extension of a broader usage.

Donald Hook offers a reference
(Donald.Hookmail.trincoll.edu):

I have been working assiduously in theolinguistics for
some years and invite you to have a look at a recent
article of mine co-authored with A. F. Kimel, Jr.,
entitled "The Pronouns of Deity: A Theolinguistic
Critique of Feminist Proposals," in _The Scottish
Journal of Theology_, vol. 46, no. 3, 1993, pp.297-323.

and Henry Churchyard (LIFY436UTXVMS.cc.utexas.edu)
reminds me of a recent Linguist exchange on the broader
issue of gender-neutral pronouns:

In Linguist List 3.275, Michael Newman
<MNEHCCUNYVM.CUNY.EDU> states:

> As regards gender-neutral pronominals, I'm in the
>midst of a rather large study (actually it's my
>dissertation) on the theme of pronominal
>variations with human reference antecedents; so
>I've seen a lot of data. On the specific issue
>involved here, it seems that it is a gross
>oversimplification to imagine that the third person
>singular subparadigm is neatly divided up into
>masculine, feminine and neuter with a gaping hole
>in the middle for uncertain, unspecified, indistinct
>or irrelevant, just waiting for the right element to
>come along and fill it.

I am aware of one language (Azande or Zande) which
actually has just such a fourth indeterminate entity in
its pronominal system. In addition to Masculine,
Feminine, and Inanimate pronouns, the language
also possesses a fourth pronominal gender category,
called `Animal' in the grammars. In addition to
denoting animals, the pronouns of this fourth
category are also used for infants and supernatural
beings (which are problematic categories for
Masculine/Feminine/Inanimate gender assignment),
as seen in the following quotations from E.E. Evans-
Pritchard, _Social Anthropology and Other Essays_
(1962):

p.246: ``This idea of a new-born babe as not yet
constituting a full human being is further displayed in
linguistic usage, for one commonly hears the foetus
spoken of as _si_ (the [Inanimate] pronoun used for
things), though often it is referred to as _u_ (the
pronoun used for animals and birds), and they
continue to speak of a baby as _u_ until it grows
strong and they have no doubt it will live, when they
begin to talk of it as _ko_ (the masculine pronoun) or
as _li_ (the feminine pronoun) according to its sex.''

p.311 (quoting a discussion of whether or not a certain
vague culture-hero is conceived of as a supernatural
entity): ``He comments, `What the people imagine
Baati to be is difficult to say. Were he accepted as a
spirit, or as a personification of the deity Mbali, he
would undoubtedly be accorded the neuter [Animal]
gender [...]. He must have [...] the power of responding
to calls made for him at his various haunting places;
and yet the Azande interrogated replied, "_Ko wa
boro_, he is like a person", again using the masculine
_ko_ and not the supernatural neuter _u_.' ''

(For information on the linguistic forms of these
pronouns, as opposed to their contextual use, see
_Linguistic Analyses: The Non-Bantu Languages of
North-Eastern Africa_, by A.N. Tucker and M.A.
Bryan (1966), p.146ff.)

Thanks again to all who responded.

Mari Broman Olsen
Northwestern University
Department of Linguistics
2016 Sheridan Road
Evanston, IL 60208

molsenastrid.ling.nwu.edu
molsenbabel.ling.nwu.edu