Re: [lojban] Lettorals

[Ivo Doko <ivo.doko@gmail.com>]

On 27 April 2011 06:35, Luke Bergen <lukeabergen@gmail.com> wrote:
> In what universe is that in any way better than
> the pronoun system that we have in lojban?

In ours apparently, because otherwise linguistic evolutionary pressure
would be different and thus would drive the evolution of natural
languages differently.


> In fact, one thing that's been really pissing me off about english lately is
> the inability to refer to a human being with a personal pronoun that doesn't
> imply a particular gender.  The best I've been able to come up with is
> "friend".  Every other personal pronoun/name-functioning-as-pronoun in
> english implies a gender ("buddy, guy, dude, sir, dad, grandpa, etc..." are
> all clearly male.)

"Person".


> "after putting the disk in the cabinet, Mabel sold it."

Missing the context. Without it, the only reasonable supposition is
that "it" refers to the cabinet, because in order to sell the disk
without the cabinet would require taking the disk out of the cabinet
again in order to give it to the purchaser, which makes the first part
of the sentence pointless. It's the same reasoning by which the
reference of "they" in

"Monkeys were fed bananas because they were ripe."

and

"Monkeys were fed bananas because they were hungry."

is unambiguous to humans.


-- 
mu'o mi'e .ivan.

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