Pronouns and proverbs
Personal pronouns
Mirja has a small set of personal pronouns.
| Singular | Plural | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | no | noono |
| 2 | ma | maama |
| 3 | su |
These have noteworthy grammatical behaviour in several ways. Most notable is the fact that the plural forms, while formed using the collective plural CVVCV# pattern, are in fact true plurals; noono and maama can both be used with groups of only two. Since these are formed with the CVVCV# pattern, the plural forms of the oblique case-marked forms noro and mara are nooro and maara, not *noonoro or *maamara. Su behaves like all other Mirja nouns, and suusu is a collective plural and not a true plural.
Su behaves unusually in that it requires no overt topic marking---it's assumed to be the topic unless there's some reason to suspect otherwise. This is mostly for historical reasons, as etymologically the topic marker is itself su, derived from left-dislocations plus su as the resumptive pronoun. It is possible (and common) to mark su with the contrastive topic marker -s, however (resulting in suthy).
Interrogatives
Mirja has a short list of interrogative pronouns and proverbs. Notably, all interrogative words (both pronouns and proverbs) are of the pattern CV́CCV̀.
[LIST?]
Question words in a sentence do not preempt question marking on the verb:
ma-rV-*
2sg-OBL-TOP
halli
who
karu-t-wwe
be.visible-PAST-Q
'who did you see?'
Interrogative proverbs, though, often drop question marking when they'd otherwise be entirely uninflected:
su
3
tavva-go-wwe
do.what-IRR-Q
'what is he going to do?'
su
3
tavva
do.what
'what is he doing?'