Abstract 1. The problem I wish to address here is first of all historiographie and that is the ultimate textual provenience of the analytic categories ‘inclusive’ and ‘exclusive’ as applied to person systems. A distinction between inclusive, a sort of ‘we’ including the addressee, and exclusive, a ‘we’ excluding the addressee, is linguistically quite common, as Forchheimer's (1953) survey and William Jacobsen's areal study of western North America (1980) demonstrate. It is of interest to the South Americanist because, according to Mary Haas’ well known historiographie study (1969), amplified by Martha Hardman-de-Bautista (1972), the terms first appeared in colonial grammatical studies of both Aymara and Southern Peruvian Quechua. But it is also of interest to the Indo-Europeanist because of the possibility that like categories may be reconstructable for Indo-European (Kurylowicz, 1964:149), and consideration of the historiography of the terms leads to greater analytic precision with respect to their nature.