this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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There are languages with a 4th person pronoun. The 3rd person is kind of the main character and the 4th someone else. That helps to disambiguate sentences like "The criminal shot the cop and drove away on his (own or the cop's) bike".
Or the "gay fanfiction problem": "He looked at him and lay his hands on his lap". Is it a happy ending or a sad one? That's one theory why gender in pronouns is so resilient: more often than not, the gendered pronoun can disambiguate which person is talked about. It doesn't always work, a 3rd/4rd person distinction is superior.
You can have an alternate third person pronoun I suppose in order to distinguish two third person individuals, but that doesn't mean there's a fourth person pronoun. The general definition is:
So things like "chat" and "breaking the fourth wall" are second person pronouns. There is no fourth person pronoun, because anything other than first and second is covered under third person.
I've looked it up and the official name is "obviative" and it is sometimes referred to as the "fourth person".
That still sounds like a special type of third person, though I guess that's just disagreeing about terminology.
I see why you would analyze it that way but I also see that it deserves a term in its own rights. As you said, it's all terminology. There are no objective definitions, at least not in linguistics
Isn't 'chat' essentially treated as a name, except that it refers to a group of people instead of an individual?
I think you're right, and the pronoun for it would be the second person plural (you in English).
Yes that makes sense
Fourth pronoun was doing well, until the fifth person enters the scene.
missed opportunity to say enters the chat
Also solved by a reflexive pronoun, as in Russian
Northern Germanic languages like swedish do the same trick btw
Now that is clever. I forgot my Slavic language had this feature