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Some analytic languages sometimes use the same prepositions for nouns and pronouns,e.g. 'I'm proud OF him' vs. 'I'm proud OF his book'. Agglutinative languages may use the same affix for nouns and pronouns too,such as in Japanese.

However,fusional languages seems to intend to use different declensions for nouns and pronouns,e.g.'JOHN'S book' vs. 'HIS book'. Often,pronouns are inflected irregularly.

So,is there any fusional language where nouns and pronouns share at least one same declension? If pronouns or nouns have more than one declensions,this means at least one of them is the same.

If there is,what is the language?if not,what is the reason?

Ps. I'm an amateur,so in the question there may contain some mistakes;if so,just post it.

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  • In fact, agglutinative languages are a kind of inflectional languages. Please, clarify the terminology you use and make sure you know the difference between the meaning of the terms inflectional, synthetic, and fusional.
    – Yellow Sky
    Jun 24, 2014 at 13:40
  • Not really an answer, but note that in Latin, the 1st and 2nd declension have a vocalicd ending (-i, -ae) for Nom Pl., unlike all the other declensions; this ending is supposedly taken from pronouns such as ille and is.
    – Colin Fine
    Jun 24, 2014 at 21:36
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    The example 'JOHN'S book' vs. 'HIS book' is not very good, because the "possessive" 'S is not exactly possessive, but HIS is really a possessive pronoun. For example, you cannot substitute "an hour's wait" for "its wait". On the other hand, note the pronunciation of the suffixes in your example: 'he' [hɪ] vs. 'his' [hɪz] is just the same as 'John' [dʒɔn] vs. 'John's' [dʒɔnz], so the seeming difference in this case is only due to the peculiarities of the English orthography.
    – Yellow Sky
    Jun 24, 2014 at 21:54
  • @YellowSky Thanks very much for your comments."Inflectional" is probably improper,but I found "A fusional language (also called inflecting language) is a type of synthetic language" on wikipedia.So - is the term "inflecting language" proper?Anyway,I would follow your comment to use "fusional" here to make it clear.
    – Kii
    Jun 25, 2014 at 5:29
  • @YellowSky One cannot substitute "an hour's wait" for "its wait",but is it only because an hour cannot wait?If "it" refers to "an hour","its wait" may be also wrong.
    – Kii
    Jun 25, 2014 at 5:37

1 Answer 1

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Yes there are many languages. For example the Oceanic languages are often very regular in their inflections. A single example is the language Kakabai, from Milne Bay, PNG.

Kakabai has a set of suffixes which are used to construct all the pronouns, while also marking inalienable possession on nouns. Here are the pronominal markers (exc=exclusive, inc=inclusive, Food=possessive pronoun for food noun class):

      Personal  Possessive  Food  Suffix
1sg   tagu      egu         kagu  -gu
2sg   tam       em          kam   -m
3sg   tana      ena         kana  -na
1exc  tama      ema         kama  -ma/mai
1inc  tada      eda         kada  -da
2pl   temi      emi         kemi  -mi
3pl   tedi      edi         kedi  -di

These suffixes are also used as object markers on verbs, to mark agreement on adjectival nouns, and the third person markers are also used to mark definiteness. This means that almost every word can end in -na, and in practice probably half of them do!

(This data is my personal research, which has not yet been published.)

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  • +1 Very interesting. Still, note that nether OP's nor your examples are about declension, although the OP asked about it. Declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number, case, and gender. Your answer is about person, and it's not on the list.
    – Yellow Sky
    Jun 25, 2014 at 1:27
  • @YellowSky I took the OP to mean declension as an inflection paradigm. "A declension is also a group of nouns that follow a particular pattern of inflection." Pronouns always inflect for person, and I showed that Kakabai inflects for number but it doesn't have case or gender.
    – curiousdannii ♦
    Jun 25, 2014 at 2:11

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