allthingslinguistic:

ms-robot:

themightyif:

magess:

dontgiveupjulia:

gothhabiba:

useless-swedenfacts:

my biggest pet peeve wiht the english language is that you don’t have sin/sina

in swedish if u have two people who use the same pronoun u can always tell whos doing what bc its like ‘han tog sin väska’ (he took his[own] bag) and ‘han tog hans väska’ would be that he took the other persons bag

but in english its like if u have 2 ppl w/ the same pronoun:

“she took her bag” whose bag????WHose BAG was it her OWN bag or the other her’s bag??????????????

“he ate his donuts” were the donuts his own???? did he fucking eat someone elses donuts??? YIU DONT KNOW bc english is a bullshit language 

also known as, the gay fanfiction dilemma

We have the same problem in portuguese

That’s very cool. I want this -own pronoun.

The obscurity mentioned in the OP doesn’t exist, though. If it’s unclear what antecedent a pronoun refers to, it’s an error. It’s an error that happens a lot, for sure, but it’s improper English grammar when it happens. There’s a page on this here.

In most cases, it’s pretty clear, though. In the above, without any other framing to confuse the situation, the donuts are his own and the bag is her own. The pronoun must refer back to an antecedent, and “he” and “she” in each example are the only available antecedents.

(That’s not to say that sin/sana might not allow more flexible sentence structure. It’s just that unclear antecedents should not be a thing in properly constructed English.) 

You *could* clarify by using “own”. Like, “She took her own bag.” It would sound awkward because it’s grammatically unnecessary, but it would clarify the situation if it *was* something where you were finding it confusing.

I’m under the impression that this is not “improper” grammar. If you mean improper in a prescriptivist way, then yeah, this seems like one of the more useful arbitrary rules I’ve seen. But I certainly don’t register anything as ungrammatical in the above sentence.

@allthingslinguistic care to share anything?

Yeah, this is a prescriptivist error. Unlike many prescriptivist errors, this is probably actually good writing advice (you generally don’t want to confuse people!), but there’s nothing GRAMMATICALLY wrong with being unclear. 

In fact, constructions like this are used in some areas of linguistics to demonstrate several interesting things about pronouns. For example: 

Every girl loves her mother. –> “her” can refer to every girl’s own mother, or to some specific other female person’s mother, it’s ambiguous.

Her mother loves every girl –> “her” can only refer to some specific other female person’s mother, not every girl’s own mother. 

Every girl is loved by her mother –> “her” can refer to every girl’s own mother, or to some specific other female person’s mother, it’s ambiguous.

Her mother is loved by every girl –> Her mother loves every girl –> “her” can only refer to some specific other female person’s mother, not every girl’s own mother. 

I’m not going to recap all of Binding Theory here, but here’s a link to it on Wikipedia and if nothing else, you’ll notice that there are tons of examples of ambiguous pronouns! 

Even more interestingly though, this puts us onto looking at how other languages solve the gay fanfiction problem.  

For example, in French,* third singular possessive pronouns don’t make any distinctions for the gender of the person they refer to (i.e. “her book” and “his book” is both “son livre”).  

You’d think this would make French fanfiction confusing regardless of the gender pairing, but in fact body parts are customarily referred to with the reflexive/indirect object pronoun + definite article, so rather than “elle prend la main” (she takes her/his hand) you get “elle se prend la main” (literally, she takes the hand to herself; idiomatically, she takes her own hand) versus “elle lui prend la main” (literally, she takes the hand to him/her; idiomatically, she takes [other person’s] hand). 

I don’t think you can do this with things that aren’t body parts though, so something like “elle se prend le livre” is not a good French sentence – you’d have to say the ambiguous “elle prend son livre” (she takes his/her book). So French is doing okay at M-rated gay fic but Swedish is still winning at Gen fic. 

*I think most of this (maybe all?) is true for other Romance languages as well, but French is the one I speak best. 

HOWEVER, languages that have logophors give Swedish a run for its money. Here’s Ewe for example, shamelessly cribbed from Wikipedia since I don’t speak any languages with logophors: 

Kofi be  yè-dzo
say LOG-leave
‘Kofi_i said that he_i left.’    

Kofi be  e-dzo
say pro-leave
‘Kofi_i said that he/she_j left.’

As we can see, “Kofi said that ye left” means that Kofi himself (i.e. whoever the speaker is) left, whereas “Kofi said that e left” means that someone who is not Kofi/the speaker left. Logophors refer to a type of pronoun that is only used to refer to someone who is the same as the speaker. 

So Ewe does not solve the gay fanfiction “he took his hand” problem as far as I can tell, but it does beat Swedish at the perhaps even more important “he said that he loved him, but the only thing was…he didn’t love him back” angsty gay fanfiction problem.