Re: Pro-drop was RE: Conlang collaboration

On Sunday 16 February 2003 1:13 pm, Joseph Fatula wrote:
> From: "Joe" <joe@...>
> Subject: Re: Pro-drop was RE: Conlang collaboration
>
> > Why, though, isn't germanic pro-drop? 'kills him' would be impossible
> > with
>
> any
>
> > other pronoun apart from 'he', and German is even less ambiguous.  All
>
> you'd
>
> > need pronouns for would be 'wir' and 'sie'(3rd pl/2nd sing, not 3rd
> > sing). Why aren't they pro drop?
>
> 'kills him' could just as easily be with 'she' or 'it', so it's not
> unambiguous.  Besides, even if it were, having only 3rd person singular as
> pro-drop would be a strange discrepancy in a non-pro-drop system.
Ah, but it really doesn't matter as to gender.  It would be obvious from the
referring sentence anyway.  The only time you'd need a 'he' or 'she' or 'it',
is when you're using two people and saying 'he said' and 'she said' and even
a pro-drop language would use pronouns in that case.