Ancient Romans had half a dozen shades of saying "I/me"
In all fairness, isn't that just because of declension (variants of the same word) - and not actually independently *different* words? Otherwise one can say Finnish has 16 different ways to say basically any noun (32 if you count plurals)
Sort of. My first-year Latin instructor, in making the point that to understand a language properly one has to understand the culture behind it, pointed this out specifically. The simplest way of saying "I am" in Latin is simply "sum". The subject of the sentence is implied by the conjugation of the verb and it is the rule in Latin to just leave off the subject pronoun if it is obvious what it is from the inflection. But unlike other pronouns "ego" is frquently, but not necessarily, exepted from this rule. It not just a simple matter of declension like the difference between "I" "me" "mine" but common use of the words with varying emphasis where the correstponding words for he/she/they would never be used. So yeah, they aren't really separate words, but it is a lot easier to say it that way than trying to explain the whole thing.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Ancient Romans had half a dozen shades of saying "I/me".
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-02-15 06:13 am (UTC)We're fucked!
no subject
Date: 2006-02-15 07:30 am (UTC)In all fairness, isn't that just because of declension (variants of the same word) - and not actually independently *different* words? Otherwise one can say Finnish has 16 different ways to say basically any noun (32 if you count plurals)
no subject
Date: 2006-02-15 02:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-15 08:17 pm (UTC)How many words do we have for feces?
for fornication?