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‘Je’ est une autre: Gendered First-Person Singular Pronouns in Tocharian A and Yemeni Arabic Dialects

Summary

The paper asks why two well-documented languages developed a feature that almost no language has: a masculine/feminine contrast in the pronoun "I". The cases are Tocharian A (näṣ vs. ñuk) and the Arabic dialects of western coastal Yemen (ʾana vs. ʾani). Neither feature was inherited from Indo-European or Semitic. The author reviews existing reconstructions, typological data from Grambank, dialect maps and medieval and epigraphic sources. Each case is examined from three angles: where the forms come from historically, which social pressures could have split them, and whether contact played a role.

For Tocharian A, the proposed story runs as follows. After the old nominative/accusative contrast collapsed, men generalized the newer form. Women kept the conservative one and sometimes extended it hypercorrectly. There is no firm evidence of Tibeto-Burman contact. For Yemen, a local ʾani competed with the supralocal ʾana. This was possibly reinforced by a Ḥimyaritic substrate and by analogy with second-person ʾanta/ʾanti.

The broader point is that ordinary sociolinguistic forces can produce typologically exotic grammar.

Key points

  • Grambank feature GB197 lists 30 of 2186 languages (about 1.37%) with gendered first-person pronouns. The author could confirm a singular-only distinction for just 12 of them (0.55%), and neither studied language is among them.
  • In Tocharian A, masculine näṣ is traced to the PIE accusative *me plus particle *ge, and feminine ñuk to the nominative *eg̑ō. Tocharian B keeps one form for both genders.
  • Yemeni dialects fall into three map regions:
    • Region A: no gender distinction.
    • Region B: the distinction appears only in the independent pronoun.
    • Region C: the distinction also appears in suffix pronouns.
  • Ḥimyaritic inscriptions show anī used by women. Because no contrasting masculine form is attested, the author considers a gendered reading in Ḥimyaritic unproven.
  • Of three hypothesized sources for ʾani, Cushitic substrate is judged least likely. Pronouns resist borrowing strongly (Tadmor 2009), and the hypothesis would require ʾani to survive for an unusually long time.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Re-checking a database count against the exact feature definition shrank 30 languages to 12, because the raw feature mixed singular and plural marking; aggregated labels can hide scope mismatches. — For Mova (learn): Before trusting counts from treebanks or knowledge sources, spot-audit whether the label's scope matches the question asked, and record the corrected figure as a check.
  • I2. Each case is explained through three separate lenses: inherited form, social pressure and contact. This keeps competing hypotheses apart instead of blending them. — For Mova (tree): When converting between UD dialects, tag each divergence with its likely cause (historical convention, annotator style, source-language influence), so conversion rules stay explainable.
  • I3. The author notes that a 10th-century observer who mostly talked to men could have missed a women-only form, so silence in a source may reflect who was sampled. — For Mova (learn): When witness parsers or LLM teachers agree, check whether they all lack coverage of a construction, and add negative controls targeting under-sampled registers.
  • I4. Proportional analogy (ʾanta:ʾanti :: ʾana:ʾani) explains how a paradigm cell can be reshaped to mirror a neighbouring one. — For Mova (tokens): Use proportional analogies over known paradigm cells to propose missing or irregular inflected forms in the morphology module, while flagging them as inferred.
  • I5. The examples use alternating näṣ/ñuk and anā/anī to signal which speaker in a dialogue is talking. — For Mova (frames): In quoted dialogue, use any available speaker-identity cues (names, gendered vocatives like "dad" or "my daughter") to resolve whom each "I" refers to during coreference.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{meinhardt2025je,
  title = {{‘Je’ est une autre: Gendered First-Person Singular Pronouns in Tocharian A and Yemeni Arabic Dialects}},
  author = {Meinhardt, Kierán},
  booktitle = {Folia Orientalia 62},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/view/778}
}

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