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

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. :)