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

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)".