Sae wrote:Tuvan uses repetition on its pronouns. It's a strange feature you even see in the name of their national anthem, "Men Tyva Men" (I'm Tuvan). If you were to say, "I am well", you'd say "men eki tur men". It's like the pronouns form a container for the sentence.
This is interesting because most other modern Turkic languages display essentially the same underlying structure, except that the personal pronoun at the end gets phonetically assimilated into the preceding word (to varying degrees depending on the language: men o'zbekman, men qazaqpyn, ben türküm, etc.) and is generally perceived more like a grammatical suffix than a pronoun. From the perspective of those other Turkic languages the interesting feature in Tuvan isn't the repetition of the personal pronoun, but the fact that it resists assimilation into the main word, without even submitting to vowel harmony.