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Rhodrese, like Einglek(*), has problems with preserving
gender distinctions in pronouns and articles. The etyma in
question here are ILLE and UNU (I simply decided that no
forms of IPSE survived, except METIPSIMUS of course!)
The regular reflexes are as follows:
: ILLE el/le ILLA elle/la
: ILLU lo (> le) ILLA la
: ILLUI leu ILLAEI lai
:
: ILLI il/li ILLAE il/le
: ILLOS lo (> le) ILLAS la/le
: ILLORUM laur (ILLARUM liar)
:
: UNU un UNA one
: *UNI eun *UNAE en
Note that UNU has plural forms, like in Old French and
Spanish. In Rhodrese they *really* are plural forms of the
indefinite article, equivalent to French _des_, since
Rhodrese noun and adjective plurals only are marginally
more distinctive from singulars than in spoken French: they
are formed with i-mutation of the stem vowel(s), basically
_e_ becoming _i_ and back vowels becoming front vowels, and
with _i_ and _eu- /y/ not changing at all, e.g. _figl_
/fiL/ can be any of 'son, sons, daughters' ('daughter' is
_figle_ -- as you see feminine singulars in _-e_ lose that
final vowel).
Now as you see there is an embarrassing high incidence of
identical forms in the reflexes of ILLE. Since you can't see
on a noun or adjective plural whether it is masculine of
feminine I may solve much of the ambiguity by having a
single set of forms in the plural -- _el, la, il_ for the
article and the following for the pronoun:
: Masc. Fem. Plur.
:
: el elle il
: le la li
: leu lai laur
The problem is that with generically ambiguous
noun/adjective plurals it might be desirable to distinguish
the genders in the article, and the convenience of doing so
in the pronouns is obvious. OTOH languages like German,
Russian and my own L1 (Swedish) get along very well with
such a lack of gender distinction in the plural of both
articles and pronouns. Those cases were a gender
distinction in plural nouns really is crucial can be fixed
in ways attested in OTL Romlangs, like _paire_ 'pear' vs.
_perair_ 'pear-tree', and adding -INA or -ISSA suffixes to
get more distinct feminines, or distinct stems like
_cavall_ vs. _hieghe_.
The indefinite article would have to follow suit, which is
OK, since _one_ looks like a parody of English and _en_
would be homophonous with IN.
What do you all think?
/Bendetx