M-T pronouns

Across many languages of northern Eurasia, the personal pronouns have a pattern of an m or m-like consonant (abbreviated 'M') in the first person singular ('1sg'), and a t or t-like consonant (abbreviated 'T') in the second person singular ('2sg'). This is commonly called the M-T pronoun pattern. The first is usually a nasal /m/, though some languages have a non-nasal /b/; the second is a non-nasal coronal consonant such as /t, d, t͜ʃ, s/, all of which may derive historically from *t. This was recently the case in English, for example, with me, my, mine in 1sg and thou, thee, thine in 2sg. The M-T pattern has been used as an argument for several proposed long-distance language families, such as the Nostratic hypothesis, that include Indo-European as a subordinate branch; Nostratic has even been called 'Mitian' after these pronouns.

A sporadic M-T pattern is to be expected around the world just by chance; given that personal pronouns typically use only a small subset of the consonants available in a language, the likelihood of chance resemblance is significant. An M-T pattern occurs in non-Eurasian languages such as Fulani and Grebo in West Africa, Usan and Salt-Yui in New Guinea, and Miwok and Lakota in North America. However, the frequency is not statistically significant, while the incidence in northern Eurasia is much higher than would be expected by chance, suggesting to many historical linguistics over the years that it may be evidence that the languages with this pattern are related. Note however that even if some of the language families listed below do prove to be related (such as Indo-European and Uralic or the Altaic families), that doesn't mean that all Eurasian families with an M-T pattern belong to that larger family: some chance occurrence in Eurasia would be no more statistically significant than it is elsewhere in the world.

Language families with an M-T pattern

An M-T pattern is found in languages of the Indo-European, Uralic, Yukaghir, Chukchi–Kamchatkan, Kartvelian, Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic language families of Eurasia, these last three constituting the core of the Altaic hypothesis. More importantly, it is reconstructed for the ancestral proto-languages of these families, which is not the case for where the pattern has been noticed outside of Eurasia.

Note that that most Indo-European languages of Europe do not have an 'M' form in the nominative case, using instead a form related to English I and Latin ego, an irregularity tracing back to Proto-Indo-European. These forms are included for completeness in the table below but are set off in parentheses. All three Altaic families are reconstructed as having 1sg in *b, but in many of the modern languages this has shifted to /m/.

A historical sound change of *ti → *či → *si is quite common, occurring independently in Greek, Proto-Finnic and likely also in Proto-Mongolic. For those who believe that the correspondences below are not simply coincidental, one must posit that the same change happened in Turkic, Tungusic and Kartvelian. Moreover, for the three Altaic families one must also posit that the 'M' denasalized to *b in the protolanguages, and then re-nasalized to /m/ in a substantial fraction of the daughter languages (though Proto-Turkic also had a pronominal suffix in *m). Such *b ↔ *m changes are not nearly as common as *ti → *či → *si. Denasalization might have happened just once, assuming a proto-Altaic language, but it could also have been a later sound change with a regional effect, such as the historically attested shift of /m, n/ to /b, d/ across the three families of Pacific Northwest languages.

Pronominal suffixes in the table (marked by a hyphen) may be object suffixes on a verb or possessive suffixes on a noun, depending on the language.

Plural forms are ignored. Some are closer to the M-T pattern than the singular is, for example Proto-Chukotko-Kamchatkan *muri 'we' and *turi 'you'. However, doubling the number of pronouns to be considered in this way increases the possibility of coincidental resemblance, and decreases the likelihood that the resulting pattern is significant.

M-T families and languages

Language		1sg M forms	2sg T forms
Proto-Indo-European		(*h₁eǵ-), *h₁mé, *h₁méne, *-mi	*tuH, *twé, *tewe, *-si
	English	(I), me, my	thou, thee, thy
	German	(ich), mich, mein	du, dich, dein
	French	(je), moi, mon	tu, toi, ton
	Spanish	(yo), me, mi	tu, te, tu
	Irish	mé	tú
	Greek	(εγώ egô), εμένα emena	εσύ esu, εσένα esena
	Russian	(я ja), меня menjá	ты ty, тебя tebjá
	Persian	man مَن, -am ـم	to تو, -at ـت
	Hindustani	मैं ~ میں maĩ, मुझे ~ مجھے mujhe	तू ~ تُو tū, तुझे ~ تجھے tujhe
Proto-Uralic		*minä	*tinä
	Finnish	minä, minu-	sinä, sinu-
	Hungarian	(én), -am	te, -ad
Proto-Yukaghir		*mət	*tət
Proto-Kartvelian		*me	*š(w)en-
	Georgian	მე me	შენ šen
Proto-Turkic		*bë, *bän-, *-(I)m	*së, *sän-
	Turkish	ben, ban-, -(I)m	sen, san-
	Uzbek	men, -(i)m	sen
Proto-Mongolic		*bi, *binu	*ci, *cinu
	Mongolian	би bi, (над nad), миний minii	чи či, чам čam, чиний činii
Proto-Tungusic		*bi	*si
	Evenki	би bi	си si
	Nanai	ми mi	си si
Proto-Chukotko-Kamchatkan		*kəm	*kəð
	Chukchi	гым gym	гыт gyt
	Itelmen	кэмма kemma, -мин -min	кэзза kezza, (-вин -win)

Non-Eurasian families are not included because an M-T pattern isn't reconstructed for the protolanguage. For example, Lakota/Dakota 1sg mi- and ma- reconstruct as Proto-Siouan *wįꞏ and *wą, and most cognates in other Siouan languages have a /w/. Similarly, 2sg *š-, though widespread across the family, is an allomorph of more general (and presumably ancestral) *yi-.

Etruscan is occasionally included in the comparison because it had 1sg mi, mini, but 2sg forms are uncertain, and without 2sg the coincidence is weak: If only one pronoun were needed for the comparison, many more language families could be included, such as Atlantic–Congo, which also has *m in the 1sg, and Afro-Asiatic, which has *t in the 2sg.

See also

• N-M pronouns, a similar pattern in North America and sporadically elsewhere

External links

• M-T Pronouns (also N-M Pronouns) at the World Atlas of Language Structures Online.