Having finished with M. Ricoeur for the time being, I found this interesting tidbit from Herr Heidegger: "W.V. Humboldt has alluded to certain languages which express the "I" by "here," the "thou" by "there," and the "he" by "over there," thus rendering the personal pronouns by locative adverbs, to put it grammatically."
Anybody know anything of such languages?
You do this in polite Japanese.
Japanese pronouns aren't actually pronouns - some consider them to be a special group of nouns. The reasoning I've heard for them not being pronouns is that there are so many of them and they vary so much according to the speaker's gender, social status, and the level of humility with which he is speaking. Some of the pronouns mean things like "the thing in front of me" (very casual 2nd person), "servant" (casual 1st person for males), "shadow/appearance" (very honorific 3rd person).
A generic polite way to refer to people regardless of their position/gender is by referring to a direction.
Kochira means "here, in this direction,"
sochira means "there, in that direction," and
achira means "over there (remote from speaker and listener), in that direction." When introducing a friend, for example, you say:
Kochira wa tomodachi no Suzuki San desu.
