I was doing some reading while writing the philosophy papers blog entry, and I came across the following very surprising fact, via Armin von Stechow. In Amharic, the personal pronoun, the translation of I, in indirect speech reports can refer to the reportee, not to the reporter. So a sentence literally translated as John said that I am a hero can mean (not must mean, but can mean) that John said that he is a hero. Obviously it is possible to have a language like this, in some weak sense of possible, but I never knew there was a natural language that behaved this way.

The discussion is in Binding by Verbs: Tense, Person and Mood Under Attitudes, especially around pages 8 and 9.

UPDATE: I should note that these observations are not original to von Stechow, and he does not claim that they are. He credits Phillipe Schelnker, whose paper on monsters recently appeared in Linguistics and Philosophy. (That paper does not appear to be freely available online.) Apologies for the misleadingness of the original post.

FURTHER UPDATE: Via Kai von Fintel, in the comments, Phillipe’s monsters paper is available via Institute Jean Nicod, here. Apologies for the above mistake. I hope all the corrections needed are now made…