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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.

Kii
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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 '14 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 '14 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 '14 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 '14 at 05:29
  • @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 '14 at 05:37
  • I don't know if my answer now applies if you're only looking for fusional languages. I think both fusional and agglutinative answers would be good for this question. – curiousdannii Jun 25 '14 at 05:38
  • @curiousdannii Your answer is good,though is not what I'm looking for - but that's because of my mistake,anyway. – Kii Jun 25 '14 at 05:51
  • @Nahald - It can't be substituted because the wait doesn't belong to an hour, wich, as I had said, is a proof that 'S doesn't really mean possession. The meaning and the function of this 'S is actually limiting the refernce of the following NP, which puts the 'S very close to the meaning of "the", cf.: "a dog's tail" = "the tail of a dog", "Obama's Administration" = "the Obama Administration". So "an hour's wait" means just "the wait of an hour." – Yellow Sky Jun 25 '14 at 05:56
  • @YellowSky I see.By the way,is that called "determiner"? – Kii Jun 25 '14 at 06:08
  • @Nahald well fusion is a matter of degree. As it happens there is a second set of rare object markers, so it could perhaps be argued the ones I presented indicate case as well ;) – curiousdannii Jun 25 '14 at 06:16

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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.)

curiousdannii
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