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 |
