• CoolMatt@lemmy.ca
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    10 hours ago

    I get 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person, but 4th person is a new concept to me and I’m trying tl wrap my head around it given your examples. This is intersting

    Edit: OOOOHH so it’s like 3rd person where you’re talking to the second person about another person, BUT instead of that person being a specific person (3rd person) it’s more like a “they/them” kind of thing where it’s not any specific person but just… Anyone at all?

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
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      8 hours ago

      One refers to an indefinite and generic group, and it’s not a “they/them” in the sense that one does not exclude oneself from that group (it’s generic, after all). I guess universal quantification is close in meaning.

      It’s a thing specific to English, or I guess Indo-European languages in general. All languages have first, second, and third person anything beyond that is non-standard. E.g. Finnish has a 0th person, “Infer who is meant from context”.