I am an Anglo Canadian, but lived in Quebec for a while some years ago. I have long been fascinated with the expressions "nous autres", "vous autres", and "eux autres" that are used in Quebec, and I believe also in Louisiana. Does anyone know the origin of these expressions? I have often wondered if they have any relation to the Spanish words "nosotros" and "vosotros".
I think that there are probably examples of plural pronoun + alteri already in Classical Latin, but as a free combination with contrastive meaning. This usage is still found in many modern Romance languages (e.g. standard French). But as I understood it, the question of the original poster — who has apparently moved on to greener pastures — was about languages where the expression "pronoun + autres/otros" has undergone grammaticalization (losing its contrastive meaning) and supplanted the simple pronoun.
For Spanish, this specific development has been dated to the 14th/15th centuries, and I don't think there would be "several centuries" of lag between spoken and written language for such a change in this period, which is well documented by texts of many different genres.
This is also how I see it, but if there had been already uses of pronoun + alteri in (Classical) Latin this would be a starting point (use of alteri without pronoun aren't of much help I'd guess).
But probably the answer anyway would lie in Vulgar Latin rather than Classical Latin: that is, if a common ancestry of those forms in several Romance languages were to be found.
In classical Latin, the primary meaning of
alter (most relevant to this discussion is the entry at I.2.g) is “the other of two, one of two, the other” (from which we get “alternative”).
Alius also means “other”, but in the particular sense of “another, different” (as in “alias”, another identity). In medieval Latin,
alius gradually disappeared and
alter came to assume its meaning. So it is from
alter that we get Spanish
otro and French
autre.
In classical Latin,
alter can be used “to mark the similarity of one object to another in qualities, etc., a second, another (as in English, a second father [
alter pater], my second self [
alter ego], and the like).”
The only use of
alter + pronoun that I’m familiar with is
alter ego (‘another I’) to refer to a close friend or kindred spirit. We have from Cicero (Fam. 7, 5):
vide quam mihi persuaserim te me esse alterum (‘See how I have convinced myself that you are another me (i.e. my other self)'). And famously (Lael. 21, 82):
amicus est tamquam alter idem ('A friend is one’s other self.’ Or more literally, ‘A friend is like another the same’).
To my knowledge, Latin did not make the “exclusivity” distinction in the use of pronouns. (In verb conjugation,
3rd 1st person plural was sometimes used for 1st person singular, but that’s more like an “inclusive”
I.) I suspect that
nous autres (“exclusive we”) developed from this sense of
alter. So
nous autres would designate “I and others like me” (but not you, the addressee). The switch to the plural form should be obvious for semantic reason. The same argument could be extended to
vous autres and
eux autres.
Sorry I haven't any idea when or how "pronoun + autres/otros" underwent grammaticalization, or how
noialtri came to be used as an emphatic pronoun.
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Edit add: I just realized that
noialtri is the exact equivalent of
nous autres; it's a "contrastive" emphatic pronoun. As for the grammaticalization of
nosotros, it loses the contrastive meaning but gains the grammatical distinction between subject (
nosotros) and object pronoun (
nos).
Nosotros remains an emphatic pronoun of sort since the subject pronoun is not necessary as it's already built into the conjugation.