Syncretisms involving clusivity
The inclusive and exclusive are commonly considered to be kinds of the first person plural. In this chapter, I will investigate whether they deserve this name by looking at syncretisms between clusivity and other person markers. Such syncretisms are rare, but a thorough investigation has resulted in a large enough sample to allow for some conclusions. The result is that the exclusive is often syncretic with the first person singular, and can thus indeed be considered a kind of first person plural. In contrast, the inclusive cannot. Further, the often claimed link between inclusive and second person in spurious. This claim probably only arose because of selected attention for those syncretisms arguing for such a connection, but disregarding all other syncretisms that argue against it. In this survey, all possible syncretisms are considered resulting in the observation that the inclusive/second person syncretism does not occur more often than others.
The Proto-Tibeto-Burman verbal agreement system
Since the appearance of Stuart N. Wolfenden's monumental Outlines of Tibeto-Burman linguistic morphology in 1929, attention has increasingly focused not only on derivational processes in Tibeto-Burman, but also on the flexional morphology of conjugations and declensions. The first systematic comparison of Tibeto-Burman conjugational and pronominal morphology was James John Bauman's elaborate Pronouns and pronominal morphology in Tibeto-Burman in 1975. Bauman put to rest any lingering doubts that the conjugations of Tibeto-Burman languages could be attributed to an Austro- Asiatic substrate, and he adduced a vast body of data demonstrating the nativeness and antiquity of conjugational morphology in Tibeto-Burman. Verbal agreement in Tibeto-Burman has traditionally been known by Hodgson's term ‘pronominalization’, based on the assumption that conjugational affixes ultimately derive from ancient independent pronouns. Bauman demonstrated that the conjugational systems of Tibeto-Burman languages, and therefore any ancient pronominal system they may reflect, are more conservative than the independent pronominal systems attested in individual languages. Based on a comparison of these conjugations, Bauman (1975: 195, 237, 247) proposed the prototypical Tibeto-Burman agreement system shown in tables 1 and 2.
Do Potential People Have Moral Rights?
By a potential person I shall mean an entity which is not now a person but which is capable of developing into a person, given certain biologically and/or technologically possible conditions. This is admittedly a narrower sense than some would attach to the term ‘potential'. After all, people of the twenty-fifth century, if such there will be, are in some sense potential people now, even though the specific biological entities from which they will develop, i.e. the particular gametes or concepti, do not yet exist. For there do exist, in the reproductive capacities of people now living and in the earth's resources, conditions adequate to produce these future people eventually, provided of course that various possible catastrophes are avoided. Indeed, in some sense of ‘potential’ there have been countless billions of potential people from the beginning of time. But I am concerned not with such remote potentialities but with currently existing entities that are capable of developing into people.