Ways English May Be More Complicated Than It Needs to Be
We already know English is a complicated language. (Like, REALLY complicated.)
So have you ever wondered if there are any specific ways that English is unnecessarily complicated that we could fix?
Probably not.
However, me being the absolute nerd that I am, I ponder this sometimes.
It turns out, some languages have simpler ways to do things. I think English could take a few pointers from these languages.
Tackling Our (s)he Problem
In the modern world, people are quickly realizing that using 'they' to talk ambiguously about people, only works for so long. (Ex: Somebody left their umbrella.)
I talked about this at length in this article.
So what are we supposed to do? Well the funny thing is, the solution might not only be to add a new pronoun, but rather, to also lose the other two.
That's right. One third person pronoun for both he and she.
I know what you're thinking.
But if there's only one pronoun how do we know if it's a he or a she. That'll never work.
Well, let's ask some languages that only have one third person pronoun:
Persian: (او) or (u)
Korean: (그) or (geu)
Turkish: (o)
Finnish: (hän)
Hungarian: (ő)
Armenian: (նա)
Estonian: (ta)
Hindi: (वह)
Urdu: (وہ)
Punjabi: (ਉਹ)
Georgian: (იგი)
Mongolian: (тэр)
Indonesian: (dia)
Mari: (тудо)
Aymara:(jupa)
Cantonese: (佢) or (keui5) -- (this can be modified to be feminine in writing, but this practice
isn't common)
Spoken Standard Mandarin (tā) -- this one is only debatable since tā can be written two ways
depending on the dialect
I think you get the idea...
Actually, the World Atlas of Language Structures identifies 254 languages that don't have a distinction between masculine and feminine in the third person (see the page here).
So I guess I still haven't answered your question. How do they distinguish who they're talking about?
Easy. CONTEXT.
Let's pretend for a moment that 'X' is a pronoun in English. Read these sentences.
Adam is going to the market, and X is going to buy some apples. While Jenny is going to the library, because X needs to turn in her books. But Alex is going to the pool because X loves to swim.
See! You were able to use context to assign one pronoun to the correct gender/person! Your mind automatically associated X to whatever person with which it made sense the most sense! This is exactly how these other languages operate, and it clears up a lot of things... Maybe English should try it. It'd be quite a shift, but maybe it'd work...
Plural Plurality
Have you ever noticed that English uses double plurality? No? Let me show you.
four apples
At first glance, this appears as only one form of plurality.
'apples'
However, most people don't realize that the number four in 'four apples' is also indicating plurality...
So why do we do this? Well, to be honest, I'm not sure.
It seems to be a western idea to make nouns plural along with their numerical indicators, however some languages don't have this unnecessary plurality.
Specifically:
Japanese
Chinese (in all nouns except ones indicating people / man,woman, I > we, etc.)
Vietnamese
Tagalog
Korean
Hungarian
Finnish (both Hun. and Fin. use plurals with standalone nouns, but never when following a
number or quantitative indicator)
So despite how weird saying 'four apple' might be, maybe we should question why we do it in the first place... Isn't it redundant?
Just a few points to think about. Why does English work like it does? Is there a reason? Would making these changes make English easier for non-native speakers to understand?
Who knows?
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