A New Song

This song is a rework of an old song. Each voice of the old version has been inverted around some 'B' close to the middle of that voice's range, so this is a non-strict example of 'negative harmony' in a microtonal environment.

A Challenge: Origin of Person Congruence

Can anyone come up with other origins of person congruence than pronouns that are merged with the verb (or, for that part, merging the verbs with verbs that previously have been merged with pronouns)?

I have two ideas, out of which one is not very good.

Reinterpretation of direct-inverse morpheme

Easily, the direct morpheme could be reinterpreted as solely being used when the subject is at the top of the animacy hierarchy, and thus either becomes a first person or first-and-second person congruence marker. (Some langs iirc rank second person higher, so that's also a possibility.)

This even leaves open the possibility of using the inverse marker solely as a marker for third persons, and then an unmarked verb could be second person. Other paths to such a situation can be constructed.

Unlikely rebracketing of case morphemes

Some languages permit omitting the accusative marker on nouns when the subject is, say, a pronoun. (This might assume case marking on the pronouns still obtains or some type of congruence already in place - otoh, Chinese is somewhat pro-drop so why couldn't this work without a pre-existing congruence?)

Now, we can restrict this to, say, omitting case marking in the presence of a first (or second) person subject. See where I am going with this? Now, let's have the case marker - either a suffix or a prefix of the noun - condition a sound change at the word boundary of the verb or just be rebracketed as a subject marker, and then generalized to all persons.

SVO: an object with an object prefix triggers a change, causing a verbal suffix
SOV: an object with an object suffix triggers a change, causing a verbal prefix

Of course, a thing that could further influence this could be a split-ergative system, where absolutives and ergatives and accusatives cause different things to be rebracketed with different persons as subject.

Ŋʒädär: Further with the Reciprocal

It has previously been stated that the reflexive pronoun ŋul- in Ŋʒädär can encode both reflexive and reciprocal meaning, but that the difference is encoded in whether the pronoun is high in the animacy hierarchy (which implies reciprocality) or low (which implies reflexivity). However, no general reciprocal / reflexive distinction was presented.

Also, the various approaches for reciprocality that exist in Ŋʒädär are not entirely trivial, and we'll find that a variety of interesting behaviours happen with regards to it.

1. Lexical Distinctions (intransitive vs. reciprocal vs. reflexive)
Some intransitive verbs have their meaning changed by turning them into reciprocals or reflexives.

 A few examples include

ʒgaŋ(uk)- 'be part of a tribe or family'
talpa-hus ʒgaŋ-sa

talpa	-hus	ʒgaŋ	-sa
talpa (proper noun)	comitative	be affiliated	1 sg/(intransitive/3sg)-direct
the Talpa clan	with	belong	I

dat ŋul-ır ʒgaŋ-da-z

dat	ŋul	-ır	ʒgaŋ	-da	-z
we	self	plur nom	belong	1pl/(intransitive/3sg)-direct	direct
we	selves		belong	1 pl

we belong to the same family unit (rather wider than core family, though)

dat	ŋul	-ır	ʒgaŋ	-da	-jut
we	self	plur nom	belong	1pl/(intransitive/3sg)-direct	inverse
we	selves		belong	1 pl

we belong to the same clan

2. Non-object Reciprocal vs. Reflexive distinctions

There is an adverb ıbars, cognate to the -bara suffix. It can signify something along the line of 'in haphazard, random disarray' -

dat	ıbars	ban	-da
we	around	run	1pl/intransitive
we	around	are running

we are running around / we are running all over the place

It can also be used for transitive verbs to signify e.g. sending things all around, doing something in multiple places, etc. However, it can also signify reciprocality. Some verbs in Ŋʒädär have suppletive forms for different recipients, and with these, for instance, ıbars will signify reciprocality:

 ür karos ıbars kep'är-ür-z
'you give each other gifts'

(note: karos, "gift" is non-count!)
The same holds with other verbs of giving, but also goes with less semantically specific verbs, albeit there is some ambiguity:

sint ıbars vörvör-täs
'they speak over each other/they speak in all directions/they speak random stuff/they argue'