First and second mentioned pronouns

[jack]

Merging "He" and "She" makes lots of sentences more ambiguous. A common idea is to instead of having 'male' and 'female' have 'first and second'. "He insulted him and he hit him" is a bit ambiguous. "He1 insulted him2 and he2 hit him1" isn't. Doesn't one of the cool artificial languages do that?

But it occurred to me -- that's exactly how geeks use "foo" and "bar". What other innovations do we have already that we didn't notice? :)

Comments

[ewx.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me to wonder if grammatical gender started out as response to the ambiguity of third person pronouns (or at least partly so).

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

That would make sense. You could think of more logical solutions, but that'd be a relatively easy transition.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I wonder which of nouns and pronouns came first?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I quick google didn't help. I guess it'd be too far back to know, you'd have to study primitive languages and see.

If you're miming, which is easier, indicating 'me' or 'you' or indicating another person? I'm not sure.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Mimed indications of another present person (or thing) are as easy as "me" and "you", I would have thought; you just point. And this could be used to support a hypothetical spoken language with no nouns at all. But if you start to talk about absent people or things then I think you pretty unavoidably need nouns.

Also, humans are really good at telling what each other are looking at (and AIUI pretty unusual in having the very contrasty eye coloring that aids this). So perhaps our pre-noun ancestors may not have used fingers to point, but their eyes?

Pronouns today seem like an optimization, which would lead to one imagining that they postdated nouns; but one way you could imagine them arising is as a sound to accompany (and ultimately replace) those physical pointers.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yep. But OTOH you can easily see a lot of me/you coming from context, which wouldn't count. I couldn't see anythign conlusive.

Pronouns today seem like an optimization, which would lead to one imagining that they postdated nouns; but one way you could imagine them arising is as a sound to accompany (and ultimately replace) those physical pointers.

Definitely. Probably more of a grammatical convenience to consider pronouns as special nouns, I can certainly *imagine* it going the other way.