Rant from lunch

[firstfrost]

Okay, whose fault is this? What were they thinking? It's like an Easter egg or something....

I hit	him	with the ball	I hit	her	with the ball
I took	his	ball	I took	her	ball
The ball is	his		The ball is	hers

Comments

Could I have a side of context with that rant, please?

[twe.livejournal.com]

?

Re: Could I have a side of context with that rant, please?

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Um. It bugs me that the pronouns are not symmetric. There are two pronouns to cover three cases for both male and female, but they don't map the same. Maybe I'm the only person that finds this sort of thing, um, unaesthetic. Or something.

It doesn't have any more context than that. :)

Re: Could I have a side of context with that rant, please?

[twe.livejournal.com]

Ah, ok. (And here I was thinking someone had hacked your spell-checking software to be more "gender-sensitive" something...)

Re: Could I have a side of context with that rant, please?

[mijven.livejournal.com]

Bugs me. Try explaining it to kids. "No, 'amn't' is not a word. But good try!"

Re: Could I have a side of context with that rant, please?

[chenoameg.livejournal.com]

I'm impressed by your ability to make the text line up like that.

I guess it doesn't bother me because I see it as the whole chart of pronouns. I wonder if we started with three for each gender and then smooshed them.

We could invent & use extra pronouns! {him, his, hisen} {hera, her, hers}

Re: Could I have a side of context with that rant, please?

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Note that there's three for "them": them/their/theirs

The thing that it makes me wonder is whether there are actually more distinct parts of speech than three, and I just don't *notice* them because in all cases one word covers the different parts.

Like, um, are there other languages in which you would use a different pronoun for any of "my nose" "my car" "my idea" "my mother" (concrete v. abstract, possession v. relation, connected v. not...)? I happily think of those as all the same part of speech, but perhaps if I were raised with a different language, I wouldn't.

pronouns

[desireearmfeldt]

I don't know of any languages that distinguish between "my nose" and "my idea" (but see The Screwtape Letters for a non-linguistic discussion of this idea), though it seems not out of the question.

As far as English goes, though: part of what you're pointing at is the remains of noun cases. German and Latin have them; English only makes a token wave at them these days. I probably can't call up all the Latin ones, not actually knowing Latin, but German has: nomenative (*He* hit the ball), accusative (the ball hit *him*), dative (give *him* the ball), and genetive (*his* ball). It also lets you say "the ball is his," which is a little different, but I don't know what that's called offhand; that's different from declining nouns, though.

In German/Latin, of course, nouns also have gender, so the pronoun in "his daughter" is different from that in "his son."

But in German, there's still some overlap where different-meaning pronouns use the same word. (Including "ihr" for the "her" in "he hit her" and the "her" in "her ball"--except the latter gets a gender ending tacked on for the gender of "ball", where the former doesn't. Wierder is "sie" = "she", "sie" = "they" (as long as they include at least one man), and Sie (with a capital S) = "you (formal)".

Re: Could I have a side of context with that rant, please?

[navrins]

Larry Niven wrote a short story referencing an alien race that uses different possessive pronouns that way, but you probably know that and that's why the idea occurs to you. I don't think any human languages make those distinctions, which is interesting.

Latin and Russian do a lot more casing than English does, and French does a little more than English but much less than those. Learning the grammar of one of those languages is actually really helpful for learning about English.

Re: Could I have a side of context with that rant, please?

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I don't explicitly remember the Niven story, but I tend to forget things quickly. I suspect you're right and that I've read it. :)

I was also thinking of things like Spanish having different verbs for the transient "to be" versus the permanent "to be" in a way that English doesn't.

Re: Could I have a side of context with that rant, please?

[twe.livejournal.com]

The thing that it makes me wonder is whether there are actually more distinct parts of speech than three

Noun/pronoun cases in English often all have the same form and usualky have far fewer forms than cases. Ditto for verb tenses. Latin has piles of them. :)