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

[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.