However, there are languages that are more pure, more beautiful, more logical.
Let me explain the problem. This problem is more widespread than one little story can encompass. But this little story will at least illustrate what I'm talking about.
Before I begin my story, it's important for you to know that everyone on the planet had a baby last summer. (I use the term "summer" somewhat loosely, to refer to any time that was warmer than I prefer.) I can't explain it other than there must have been a lot of love in the air last winter.
So, every time we hang out with other couples, the main topic of conversation is usually their baby, which happens to have been born last summer. Since we have no baby that was born last summer (or ever), our main strategy is to talk about our little nephew (who was born last summer, thus qualifying him for discussion).
On Saturday, I was doing just that. I said something about "Robyn's sister and her husband." My friend said, "but Robyn's husband is you." Thus, the ambiguous pronoun came to rear its ugly head. I could have said something like, "Robyn's sister and Robyn's sister's husband." But then, why do we even have pronouns if we can't use them?
But if English were like math, I could say "(Robyn's sister) and her husband." Thus, order of operations would kick in, the parentheses would be applied first and the resulting noun of (Robyn's sister) would be the only noun available for the pronoun to apply to.
If English were a computer language it would be even better. The Robyn object would probably have a method called "sister" which would return a sister object. The sister object would probably have a husband method as well. Thus we would say, Robyn.sister() + Robyn.sister().husband(); (We would probably overload the method to change which sister is returned based on the parameters, but you're probably not interested in that.)
Of course, in a perfect computerized world, I wouldn't even have to refer to any siblings of Robyn. I would probably come with a nephew method. Thus, I would just Jeff.nephew() and hand you an exact copy of my nephew object that you could examine to your heart's content.
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| nephew.tongue is long and nephew.isPrecious is true |
For the record, "irregardless" is considered to be "non-standard" English, which basically means that it's wrong but too many people use it anyway to claim that it's not a word at all. You can't blame the language for user error. That being said, I do agree that pronouns are flawed. Regardless (or irregardless), thanks for posting a cute picture of Will. :)
ReplyDeleteI'm glad that "irregardless" is basically a user error. But it's frustrating when I point out the user error and people say, "well, it's in the dictionary, so it's a word." Those are the situations where I want to punch the people that publish dictionaries.
DeleteAlso, thanks for producing a cute nephew that I can post pictures of. I just really wish you'd let me post your address and phone number in case someone wants to talk to him.
You can assign "Robyn.sister()" to a variable and then it would be like using a pronoun (with the added benefit of no ambiguity).
ReplyDeleteTrue. I suppose that could be done in English as well. I could have started with the statement, "Megan is Robyn's sister." That would be equivalent to sister megan = robyn.sister();
DeleteI agree that the English language can be ambiguous but most of the time if the correct tradition module is plugged into the parser your original statement would be processed as you would expect. So I suspect your couple friends had a broken tradition module.
ReplyDeleteNext time I see him I'll tell him to update his parser. Although, I'm pretty sure he was intentionally exploiting the ambiguous pronoun.
DeleteI'm just glad we got that all straightened out. What would I do without you? Oh and the picture is one of my favorites. I just love that kid!
ReplyDelete