I think using first person pronouns for another person is stretching the limits of the English language. I don’t know if I could form a complete thought without confusing myself, much less my intended audience lol
Incidentally, Japanese can use first-person boku in the second and third persons as well. Maybe other first-person pronouns (/deictic classifiers) can be used in this way too, but I’ve only heard of this phenomenon with boku.
This is possible in Japanese because that language has many different words for “me”, with the different words often encoding things like dialect, gender, age, personality, relationship, formality, and things like that. So, if the person speaking doesn’t seem like the boku type, then boku most likely instead refers to someone else in the immediate context who actually would refer to thonself as boku — with the speaker using that pronoun to show sympathy by placing thonself in the boku’s shoes.
My mom first learned this interesting tidbit when we watched this video together a while ago. She thought this was a very strange and confusing feature, but for me… not so much. Because while using a first-person pronoun in the second or third persons is treated as perfectly grammatical in Japanese, the phenomenon of “pronoun reversal” is actually observed in a number of L1 English-speaking children as well — particularly autistic children, including my brother, but not me to my knowledge.
Among autistic children, pronoun reversal isn’t necessarily an intentional display of sympathy making use of the nuances of self-reference to clarify the referent, like Japanese does — it’s a lot more simply that the people these children learned English from, always addressed the children as “you”, and themselves as “I”; and so the children learned to map these words to the persons they always referred to.
Like a lot of other peculiarities of autistic speech, pronoun reversal is pathologized and is basically always forced out of children by language therapy or whatever… Which I honestly feel is kind of a shame, that there’s this whole range of diverse and inventive uses of language that end up in medical journals far more often than in linguistics journals. I dunno if I’m weird or wrong for feeling that way, but yeah.
Though I should also note that English we can be used in some situations as an exclusively second-person pronoun grammatically. But when we already commonly includes the listener(s), this feels a lot less limit-stretching than using I as a second- or third-person pronoun.
I think using first person pronouns for another person is stretching the limits of the English language. I don’t know if I could form a complete thought without confusing myself, much less my intended audience lol
Abbott and Costello
Incidentally, Japanese can use first-person boku in the second and third persons as well. Maybe other first-person pronouns (/deictic classifiers) can be used in this way too, but I’ve only heard of this phenomenon with boku.
This is possible in Japanese because that language has many different words for “me”, with the different words often encoding things like dialect, gender, age, personality, relationship, formality, and things like that. So, if the person speaking doesn’t seem like the boku type, then boku most likely instead refers to someone else in the immediate context who actually would refer to thonself as boku — with the speaker using that pronoun to show sympathy by placing thonself in the boku’s shoes.
My mom first learned this interesting tidbit when we watched this video together a while ago. She thought this was a very strange and confusing feature, but for me… not so much. Because while using a first-person pronoun in the second or third persons is treated as perfectly grammatical in Japanese, the phenomenon of “pronoun reversal” is actually observed in a number of L1 English-speaking children as well — particularly autistic children, including my brother, but not me to my knowledge.
Among autistic children, pronoun reversal isn’t necessarily an intentional display of sympathy making use of the nuances of self-reference to clarify the referent, like Japanese does — it’s a lot more simply that the people these children learned English from, always addressed the children as “you”, and themselves as “I”; and so the children learned to map these words to the persons they always referred to.
Like a lot of other peculiarities of autistic speech, pronoun reversal is pathologized and is basically always forced out of children by language therapy or whatever… Which I honestly feel is kind of a shame, that there’s this whole range of diverse and inventive uses of language that end up in medical journals far more often than in linguistics journals. I dunno if I’m weird or wrong for feeling that way, but yeah.
Though I should also note that English we can be used in some situations as an exclusively second-person pronoun grammatically. But when we already commonly includes the listener(s), this feels a lot less limit-stretching than using I as a second- or third-person pronoun.