Re: Ambiguity

On Sun, 4 Jan 2009 21:22:36 -0800, Roger Mills <romiltz@...>
wrote:

>How do various other conlangs deal with ambiguities like this? Has the
problem arisen? How much attention is it really worth?

Well, I've considered many times with Njenska of having multiple *sets*
of third person pronouns... like he-1, he-2 (maybe more?) which address
separate people/things and therefore help limit confusion in such cases.
Thus:

	Here is Jenny and here is Mary, she-2 feeds her-1 baby. -> Here
	is Jenny and here is Mary, Mary feeds Jenny's baby.

I'm pretty sure some natlangs have this feature, though I don't know
what it is called.

I was always taught back in school for (prescriptive) English grammar
that a pronoun refers to the most recently mentioned gender-agreeing
noun.  In spoken language, we completely trounce that rule, but I try
and follow it when I'm writing, lest I run into a quagmire of pronoun
confusion.

Most languages seem to handle your examples primarily by context, and
when context is insufficient, rewording or replacing pronouns with
nouns, which is how my conlang, as well as English, does it... but
admittedly, Njenska's grammar isn't all that inventively divergent from
English.

Then there's those englangs which allow explicit declaration of what
various pronouns refer to like a programming language, but I take it
your language doesn't work like that :)

Joel

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