Once Again on the Comparison of Personal Pronouns in Proto-Languages

Kirill Babaev (Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow), babaev@yandex.ru)

Journal of Language Relationship, № 1, 2009 - p.37-48

Abstract: The article discusses the importance of comparison of personal pronouns for studies dealing with long-range linguistic relationship. It is recognized that individual similarities between pronouns reconstructed for various low-level protolanguages may be ascribed to chance resemblance or borrowing, but the same is much less probable for comparisons between entire paradigmatic systems of pronouns. Based on a brief survey of the principal pronominal forms and markers in most of the protolanguages reconstructed for the world’s language families, it is asserted that many of the current hypotheses on macrofamilies, such as Nostratic, Sino-Caucasian, Austric, and others, are indeed supported by such paradigmatic similarities.

Keywords: personal pronouns

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