Detail #185: Inverse Number and Pronouns

Inverse number is a pretty neat thing found in the Tanoan family. Each noun class has an associated number or two, whose marking for that class is zero. The remaining number(s) are marked by a number marker.

Now, with personal pronouns this could open up some fun: of course, the simple way would be to have personal pronouns either follow some number class, so e.g. "I" is unmarked and "we" is marked. We could also, of course, leave the personal pronouns out of it altogether. However, fun could be had:

Let's have both singular and plural pronominal roots:

er : I
mur : we

Let's have the inverse number marker -xi, and have this apply to both of those as well:

erxi : we
muxi : I

There should be some subtle difference though: maybe erxi expresses my role in it as that of a representative of some group, whereas muxi represents my group as an extension of my will - i.e. I and my army, or the like. 

Another alternative could use these for deference and the like.

Many Tanoan languages seem to have classes that, for instance, mark dual with the inverse marker, and singular and plural both go with the zero marker. Tanoan languages also have a single number be the default, marking two numbers with the same marker. There is no guarantee that the marker or absence thereof only goes on "neighbouring" numbers.

If the language further has a dual number, a dual pronominal root could make stuff even more fun, but there may be parsing restrictions there, such as 'dual.inv' only parsing as singular (or only as plural, it's up to the conlanger, obviously) on pronouns. The parsing may of course be different for different persons as well (and different for pronouns of different noun classes too!)