= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
wnoise comments on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (823)
Dost thou also find the use of "singular you" annoying?
There is a difference between those situations. "You" is the only modern second person singular pronoun, whereas the third person singular has "he" and "she" in addition to the oft-used "they," the latter obviously being the one which doesn't fit.
Personally, I do feel it would be better to have some separation among the singular and plural second person pronouns, to avoid awkward constructions like "you all" and similar things. However, "thou" doesn't seem to be a very viable option, given its current formal, Biblical connotations.
Also, the English language is missing a possessive form of the pronoun "which" (compare "who" and "whose"), if anyone wants to work on that problem.
One really clumsy thing in English is that there is no interrogative pronoun to which the answer would be an ordinal number (i.e. N-th in some sequential order). There isn't even a convenient way to ask that question.
Don't we use "whose" for that purpose?
That is the suggested remedy, but it's a bit of a kludge. "Who" is intended to be used as a pronoun for people, so the possessive form "whose" should be used in the same way.
I'm a bit confused that you call it just a "suggested remedy"; my point is not that anyone advises this, it's that this is what English speakers actually do.
Intended by who? Should why? It's not even clear offhand that we should regard "whose" as exclusively a possessive form of "who", given the above.
There's a difference between what people actually do and what they should do.
Exactly my point. "Who" is for people, i.e. those beings that can have intentions.
But doing so reduces the clarity of the language, by conflating two different meanings.
I have to disagree with this. I'm also someone who's bothered when words with multiple distinct meanings get merged, but I don't think this can be described as a case of that. (I suppose the most obvious objection is that this does not reduce the quality of the language because there is nothing to compare to. If English ever had these other words you suggest, it can't have been for hundreds of years at least.)
In any case, these words are just function words, they're just relative pronouns. Merging different relative pronouns doesn't add extra meanings - most of them could be pretty well expressed with "what" - it just forces you to include the information even if it's not relevant (maybe we don't care if what did this is animate or not), while allowing some things to become slightly shorter by being implicit (we can say "he who did this" rather than "What person did this". This wouldn't work as well with "whatever", but that's a quirk of how the word is formed in English rather than any general feature of relative pronouns.)
Basically you're just introducing another unavoidable; it doesn't "add meaning" any more than does English's insistence that all finite verbs have tense.
Off the top of my head I can't think of any situation where the antecedent of "whose" would be unclear due to its ability to also refer to inanimate objects.