Pronouns locate a speaker and a referent

The Lodiana grammar and Wilson’s personal-pronoun tables distinguish first person, second person and third person, with singular and plural rows. The third-person account also distinguishes a referent near the speaker from one farther away. Its English glosses include he, she and it for the same demonstrative forms, so an English masculine or feminine pronoun is not a complete guide to the Punjabi word. The table separately records forms used in different case relationships.[1][2]

A plural can address one person

Kaur and Yamada’s Punjabi comparison explains that tusii serves both a plural addressee and one singular addressee treated honorifically. Their contrasting tuu is singular and non-honorific in the paradigm presented. The plural form takes plural agreement even with one respected person: their examples show this on a predicate adjective and the verb. Thus a plural agreement pattern does not always mean that several people are being addressed.[3]

Their third-person comparison makes the same distinction between a group and a singular honorific referent. Its nominative singular and plural pronouns sound alike, while case-marked forms can reveal the difference. Respect therefore interacts with reference and agreement; it is not established merely by counting how many people a pronoun denotes. These are the explicit contrasts of the study’s Punjabi examples, rather than a survey of every speaker’s social choices.[3]

Keep local forms and social use visible

Wilson supplies separate Salt Range pronoun forms rather than folding every local variant into one table. He also records a respectful third-person expression with hori and distinguishes its oblique form hora. Such entries show why a historical district grammar can contain more than the familiar English I, you and they. Read person, number, case and the stated social use together. Neither a nineteenth-century local list nor a modern grammatical contrast supplies a complete rule for every relationship, family or conversation.[2]

Sources & notes

Source records include access dates and, where known, limits on what was examined. Checks used AI assistance; independent human or specialist review has not been completed.

  1. Lodiana American Presbyterian Mission Press; J. Newton attribution in the archive catalogue; Rev. J. Porter, press superintendent. A Grammar of the Panjabi Language; with Appendices ↗Historical descriptive and teaching grammar · Source date: 1851 · Locator: Printed pp 15–16 / PDF 28–29, personal-pronoun tables and their contrasting case rows; original title PDF 6, preface PDF 8–9 and errata PDF 13. Accessed 2026-11-02.The specified pages of the actual 1851 Bodleian/Google scan were read. Displayed script examples were checked against rendered pages. The original title names the press and superintendent; the archive catalogue attributes J. Newton. The preface addresses readers familiar with Urdu and acknowledges regional variation. Its terminology and examples are historical descriptions, with no recording or complete account of present-day usage. Purist judgements and social hierarchies are not adopted. Later revised editions and editorial additions were not used.Return to Pronouns locate a speaker and a referent, paragraph 1 ↑
  2. J. Wilson; acknowledged assistance of Munshi Mahbub Alam; Punjab Government Press. Grammar and Dictionary of Western Panjabi, as Spoken in the Shahpur District, with Proverbs, Sayings and Verses ↗Historical district grammar and dictionary · Source date: 1899 imprint; preface September 1898 · Locator: Printed pp 19–20 / PDF 37–38, personal pronouns and Salt Range alternatives; p 32 / PDF 50, hori/hora respect expression; original title PDF 7 and preface PDF 11. Accessed 2026-11-02.The specified pages of the actual BSB original-edition scan were read. The title date 1898 and printing imprint 1899 are distinguished. Wilson credits Munshi Mahbub Alam and limits collection to historical Shahpur. Salt Range alternatives retain their local scope. Colonial purity rankings, caste characterisations and unseen earlier works are not adopted. Roman forms were not converted into newly asserted script spellings or certified pronunciation.Return to Pronouns locate a speaker and a referent, paragraph 1 ↑Return to Keep local forms and social use visible, paragraph 1 ↑
  3. Gurmeet Kaur and Akitaka Yamada; Glossa. Honorific (mis)matches in allocutive languages with a focus on Japanese ↗Linguistic analysis with a Punjabi comparison · Source date: 2022 in the author’s publication list · Locator: Actual indexed primary PDF body, section 3.1, printed pp 9–10, Table 3 and examples 12–14; author publication list confirms title, authors, Glossa 7(1), pp 1–38 and DOI 10.16995/glossa.7669. Accessed 2026-11-02.The selected actual primary-body text from pp 9–10 was exposed by the public search reader and read. Direct publisher page and full-PDF requests returned an access-denied HTML response; no successful PDF download, page-image inspection or full-paper reading is claimed. The author’s institutional publication list supplies the 2022 citation; a conflicting institutional export’s 2021/volume 44 fields are not adopted. Only the explicit Punjabi pronominal paradigm and plural agreement in these examples support this article. The Japanese analysis is not generalised to Punjabi.Return to A plural can address one person, paragraph 1 ↑Return to A plural can address one person, paragraph 2 ↑
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Record PH-LAN-0076 · English edition · human review not performed