Cenyani grammar reference

• Contents
• 1 Usage
• 2 Actual pronouns

This category of pronouns contains those whose English equivalents are “that”, “this” and their respective plural forms. These are commonly used to point out specific entities, in order to disambiguate or emphasise that you’re referring to a specific item, but their usage is a bit more complicated than that.

Usage

As mentioned above, demonstrative pronouns are commonly used to point out specific entities. As in English, there are two degrees of demonstrative pronouns: near (“this”) and far (“that”). Also as in English, near pronouns are used when the object or entity being pointed to is near the speaker, where “near” is generally defined as “within reach (of one’s hands)”. Far, in turn, is generally defined as “out of reach”, and is pretty much used for anything the near form cannot be used for.

However, demonstrative pronouns are not exclusively used for objects in physical space. In written texts especially, the near forms are used for things which are about to be mentioned; for example, “This is what he thought” makes the listener or reader expect a description or explanation of what the person thought. Similarly, things which have already been mentioned are typically referred to with the far pronoun. If the guy in the sample sentence says “This is what I want: [...]”, his husband might reply with “That sounds interesting” – the “that” refers to what the first male wants, which at this point is of course something that has already been mentioned. The second male might then continue with “This is fun too”, followed by a description of whatever is on his mind.

Events in time are referred to similarly: events that are just about to take place are typically referred to with the near pronouns (“This should be easy,” said the man after refusing to call the plumber), or events which are very close by in time (“this Thursday”, referring to an upcoming Thursday), or events which are ongoing (“Well, this is an interesting afternoon!”). Events in the past, in turn, are referred to with the far pronoun: “that was a fun trip last year”. Events in the non-immediate future, curiously, do not typically use demonstrative pronouns; personal pronouns are used instead: “It’s going to be nice visiting the parents next month”.

As is common among Cenyani pronouns, demonstrative ones, too, make a distinction between animate and inanimate, as well as a distinction between all three grammatical numbers. Demonstrative pronouns also have to agree in core case with the noun they modify. Finally, the noun or noun phrase modified by the demonstrative pronoun must always be in the definite form. Cases, numbers and definiteness are explained in nouns.

Actual pronouns

The base pronoun tey comes from ta “it” + ey “here”. Similarly, toye has oye (“there”) in place of ey. Sey and soye come from sen rather than ta.

As you can see in the tables above, demonstrative pronouns are extremely regular, to the point where I actually wonder why I didn’t just create a table of pronoun inflection rules instead.