Nepali Pronouns: System and Etymology

This paper investigates the Nepali pronoun system and its etymological explanations. The first- and second-person pronouns are the real pronouns. The third-person pronoun is a personal pronoun denoting a human, and and are demonstratives. Number distinction is in form and agreement; gender distinction is in agreement. The first person has no honorificity; the second and third person have low, mid, and high honorific forms. Low honorific forms are always singular; the mid honorific forms are the real plural bases and have plural agreement. The high honorific forms are complex or extended third-person agreement with a complex verb phrase. The preforms consist of demonstratives, interrogatives, relatives, and reflexives. The preforms combine with the scope-marking suffixes to make pronominal adjectives of quantity, kind, size, and possession, and pronominal adverbs of location, direction, time, and similarity in manner. The study of Nepali etymology is challenging because no written documents of Khas Prakrit and Apabhramshaare available. Data from the Western Prakrit and Apabhramsha are reliable sources. The early etymological studies of Nepali pronouns are problematic because they are speculative, lack adequate evidence and explanation, and do not follow the principles of historical change of a grammatical system.