(Ex)clusive Amator

Often the minor details of languages and the quirks of their dialects fascinate me - and I mean that in its root sense of bewitching so that the bewitched must think about his love, be it a grammatical feature or nubile young maiden. In this case, what has bewitched me is not some Thessalian hussy, but a regional clusivity distinction in the Beijing dialect of Mandarin Chinese (which, incidentally, is not quite the same as Standard Mandarin Chinese). Clusivity, as I have written elsewhere, is the distinction between the inclusion of the addressee or his exclusion from the first person pronoun. It is an open question whether one would prefer the blunt clarity of the exclusive pronoun ("zan2men" vs. "wo3men"), or the awkward correction of the meaning of the first person plural in languages which lack a clusivity distinction. In the languages of East Asia, all of which appear to have or have had forms specific to status as well as person, some of the distinctions may have arisen as a separation of plural forms into distinct semantic spheres, although I suppose phonological change could have disguised related roots. Certainly, it took me a moment to connect Sino-Korean 'ku' and Mandarin Chinese 'jiu3' as the number '9'. The clusive forms of Tok Pisin (yumi vs. mipela) are, unsurprisingly, morphologically transparent, but sufficient time could disguise its origins. It is noticeable that the Mandarin exclusive form (the one which is clearly and analogically related to the first person singular "wo3") is the one favored by speakers who do not make the distinction. This is a case of analogical levelling, encouraged by the transparent system of plural formation. It makes me wonder whether the "men" of the Chinese plural is not generic plural marker that somehow became restricted to pronouns.