Demonstrative - Demonstrative Series in Other Languages

Demonstrative Series in Other Languages

Latin had several sets of demonstratives, including hic, haec, hoc ("this near me"); ille, illa, illud ("that over there"); and iste, ista, istud ("that near you") – note that Latin has not only number, but also three grammatical genders. The second set of Latin demonstratives (ille, etc.), developed into the definite articles in most Romance languages, such as el, la, los, las in Spanish, and le, la, les in French.

Although, with the exception of Romanian and some varieties of Spanish and Portuguese, the neuter gender has been lost in the Romance languages, Spanish and Portuguese have kept neuter demonstratives:

Spanish	Portuguese	gender
este	este	masculine
esta	esta	feminine
esto	isto	neuter
ese	esse	masculine
esa	essa	feminine
eso	isso	neuter
aquél	aquele	masculine
aquella	aquela	feminine
aquello	aquilo	neuter

Some forms of Spanish (Caribbean Spanish, Andalusian Spanish, etc.) and Portuguese (Brazilian Portuguese) also occasionally employ ello (Sp.), elo (Port.), which is an archaic survival of the neuter pronoun from Latin illud.

Neuter demonstratives refer to ideas of indeterminate gender, such as abstractions and groups of heterogeneous objects.

Classical Chinese had three main demonstrative pronouns: proximal 此 (this), distal 彼 (that), and distance-neutral 是 (this or that). The frequent use of 是 as a resumptive demonstrative pronoun that reasserted the subject before a noun predicate caused it to develop into its colloquial use as a copula by the Han period and subsequently its standard use as a copula in Modern Standard Chinese. Modern Mandarin has two main demonstratives, proximal 這 and distal 那; its use of the three Classical demonstratives has become mostly idiomatic, although 此 continues to be used with some frequency in modern written Chinese.

Hungarian has two spatial demonstratives: ez (this) and az (that). These inflect for number and case even in attributive position (attributes usually remain uninflected in Hungarian) with possible orthographic changes; e.g., ezzel (with this), abban (in that). A third degree of deixis is also possible in Hungarian, with the help of the am- prefix: amaz (that there). The use of this, however, is emphatic (when the speaker wishes to emphasize the distance) and not mandatory.

The Cree language has a special demonstrative for "things just gone out of sight," and Ilocano, a language of the Philippines, has three words for this referring to a visible object, a fourth for things not in view and a fifth for things that no longer exist."