okay i dont know anything about linguistics but even with that limitation i want to do some headcanons about what i imagine gallifreyan is like
i imagine theyâd have different pronouns for âi (current regeneration)â, i (all regenerations)â, and maybe something like an i/you combination when youre talking to yourself? or like, when youre saying âi (current regeneration)â to another regeneration of yourself youâd use a different i than if you were talking to someone else. i need a diagram for this. alright, some personal pronouns i can imagine they could have:
you (also me/different regeneration); you/i
you (your regeneration exclusively, as contrasted with me (current regeneration))
we (current regeneration + (multiple) different regeneration(s?)); we/i(all)
we (current regeneration + another person)
you pl (different regenerations); you/we
you pl (different regenerations exclusively, contrasted with we/i(all))
they (other regenerations); they/we(i/all)
??? is this understandable? im not sure i even understand anymore ashjkhg
this is all still very individual though. and thats alright for the doctor and the master and stuff, but weâre still dealing with a species that is telepathically all connected to each other. so there should probably also be words for like
okay some example sentences for each pronoun. i dont think these were all said in gallifreyan but if they were, i think these would be the pronouns used.
i (current regeneration):
ELIZABETH: Who is this man?
10: Thatâs just what I was wondering.
DOCTOR: This is lavish, for a tent. Iâm the Doctor, these are my new best friends, Ryan, Graham and Yaz.
i (all regenerations):
YASMIN: So everything we saw, everything weâve lied to people about, is this normal for you?
DOCTOR: Iâm just a traveller.
you (also me/different regeneration); you/i
11: Oi. Ha! Matchstick man.
10: Youâre not.
MASTER: You mean, Iâm going to turn into a woman and you donât even remember it happening?
MISSY: Oh! Am I a woman now?
you (your regeneration exclusively, as contrasted with me (current regeneration))
11: Listen, what you get up to in the privacy of your own regeneration is your business.
MASTER: Becoming a womanâs one thing, but have you got empathy?
you (another person)
MISSY: You absolutely had to bring her, did you?
we (current regeneration + other regeneration(s)); we/i(all)
WAR DOCTOR: Hello.
10: Iâm the Doctor.
11: Sorry about the Dalek.
10: You tell yourself itâs justified, but itâs a lie. Because what I did that day was wrong. Just wrong.
11: And, because I got it wrong, Iâm going to make sure you get it right.
we (current regeneration + another person)
DOCTOR: Hi. Us again.Â
alright im getting bored of this now and the second half of these are too complicated. im watching the scene with 3 doctors in the barn trying to figure out what pronouns they might be using and,, im just gonna postpone that to another post. so last one for now:
DOCTOR: Iâm the Doctor. Iâm a Time Lord. Iâm from the planet Gallifrey in the constellation of Kasterborous. Iâm nine hundred and three years old and Iâm the man whoâs going to save your lives and all six billion people on the planet below. You got a problem with that?
DOCTOR: I was born on a planet called Gallifrey in the constellation of Kasterborous. Iâm a Time Lord. I can regenerate my body. I stole this Tardis and I ran away. Iâve been travelling ever since. The Master was one of my oldest friends. We went very different ways. Questions?
JENNY: Whatâs a Time Lord?
DOCTOR: Itâs who I am. Itâs where Iâm from.
JENNY: And Iâm from you.
i also imagine that the relationship between speakers matters a lot, seeing as they are all about ranks and titles and stuff and also when youre a whole civilisation that dabbles in time travel and regeneration, i think itâd be important to be able to keep straight what everyoneâs perspective on each other(âs timeline) is when you meet someone.
so i imagine - and i dont know what the right words for this are, or if itâs even a thing that natural languages (that function enough like human natural languages that the doctor can learn human languages but also must be different fundamentally because theyre built on two senses that humans just do not have) do, or could reasonably do -Â but i imagine that who youre speaking to changes, like, the way your entire sentences are inflected or whatever. what would that be? would that be like, modalities?
okay i went on wikipedia and
this does seem kinda like what im thinking about? im not sure if this is what i mean but im thinking that like
if youve got like 13 talking to 9 there would be Something different about her sentences, idk if it would be that the verbs would be like conjugated different or something else but just Something about how just like, how she spoke in general, that would be different than if she was talking to 10 or 11 or 12. and how 9 would speak to her wouldnt match! like, Whatever the thing is that im thinking is changing here, it would be different for 9 because heâs talking to his future, and 13 is talking to her past. they each have different perspectives on their relationship in that conversation and that needs to be expressed in how they spoke.
i dont think itâd be modalities actually. i dont think itâd be the verbs that changed. itâd be something else. im not sure what the concept im imagining would be called, or if it even exists on earth, i think it must, i just dont know enough about languages to say what it is. itâd be like, a formality thing? like a register! maybe itâs a register?
i looked up register, and i think what im thinking is sort of like a register but less⌠optional? it wouldnt be about word choice and politeness rules, itâd be about the way words bend. like itâd change the nouns or whatever. change suffixes? prefixes? i dont think itâd change the nouns but like. do you know what i mean? itâd change something about the entire sentences thatâd make it immediately clear the relationship between the speakers. maybe itâd be even something that would be put on the sentence as a whole. maybe they dont make sentences word by word. their written language is like, everything all at once, the same way they experience time probably, a little bit, so maybe their spoken language is also like that. maybe the temporal relationship between speakers isnt expressed in individual words but in an inflection that somehow goes on the entire sentence. like a question?
thats the main two things im thinking about rn. what kind of personal pronouns theyâd have and how theyâd express the relationship between speakers as something really very unavoidable. i have more thoughts, and i also want to think more about how their primary senses being time and telepathy would influence how they put words to concepts. how they conceptualise things. how they put boundaries around concepts.