גרמטיקליזציה של כינויי גוף

In §2 (p. 594) Heine and Song say they are not going to deal with cases like Ainu クアニ kuani ‘I’. I understand the rationale, but cases like this, of renewal or strengthening, can give rise to new pronouns whose connection with the old pronominal element (ku- in our case) is opaque or non-existent for the speakers (say, theoretically, if the kua part would be eroded due to phonetic reduction, resulting in a new and unrelated *ni ‘I’ pronoun). Something similar, but not identical, happens with Spanish Vuestra Merced > Usted, Portuguese Vossa Mercê > Você and Dutch Uwe Edelheid > U (p. 606), where the second person part Vuestra, Vossa, Uwe is eroded.

In §2.3.2.1 Heine and Song give nouns meaning ‘person’ or ‘people’ as a source for 1pl pronouns. Since this is also a source for many endonyms (e.g. Ainu アイヌ ainu ‘person, human being, comrade, father, husband, adult male’; German Deutche, ultimately from PGmc *þiudiskaz and PIE *tewtéh₂ ‘people, tribe’; Romani Rom ‘man, husband’; U’wa U’wa ‘people’; Dâw Dâw ‘people’; Quechua Runa ‘person’; Guarani Abá ‘men, people’), it seems to me interesting to compare the two phenomena.

There is a famous case of degrammaticalization of personal pronouns I think is worthy of mentioning: Freud’s structural model of the psyche. The most prevalent strategy of turning the first and third personal pronouns into nouns in this context is by using definite articles and forms, combined with capitalization (in German and English, among others) or special typographic symbols not usually used with normal nouns (in Scandinavian languages): German das Es, das Ich; Hebrew האיד ha id (never הזה ha ze, which means ‘this one’), האני ha aní, האגו ha égo; English the It, the I (the id, the ego); Swedish detet, jaget (sometimes with -'et, --et or -:et) and Norwegian and Danish det-et and jeg-et. An interesting case is that of Esperanto, which employs the nominalizing suffix -o found in all nouns (ĝio from ĝi ‘it’ and mio from mi ‘I’); degrammaticalization is quite common in Esperanto, which uses derivation extensively (cf. ismo ‘an ism’, from -ism ‘-ism’; aro ‘a herd, group, set’ from the collective derivational suffix -ar).