AdeleneDawner comments on Open Thread: January 2010 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 01 January 2010 05:02PM

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Comment author: AdeleneDawner 01 January 2010 06:06:56PM 7 points [-]

This article about gendered language showed up on one of my feeds a few days ago. Given how often discussions of nongendered pronouns happen here, I figure it's worth sharing.

Comment author: Daniel_Burfoot 02 January 2010 01:47:48PM 5 points [-]

Nice, I liked the part about Tuyuca:

Most fascinating is a feature that would make any journalist tremble. Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.

It would be fun to try to build a "rational" dialect of English that requires people to follow rules of logical inference and reasoning.