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Grammar failure and why you shouldn't follow pronoun rules
| But there's more to my shit! There are many failure's in language, and when you speak it's even worse than writing. So does this mean we shouldn't even have to obey the gender pronoun garbage rules when people say you can't call a person with a vag a man? Does it justify grammar rule breaking or am I stoopid? Again mames gender seem like a social construct, which some people believe and some people don't. My opinion
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| >>99379
Back when I used to do writing classes (albeit not an /English/ writing class), the example you gave seems to illustrate 'vague utterance with few context.'
You can exactly reword the sentence to be structured as such: > "While my mom was sleeping, I used her bedroom to finger a girl."
Now the context is clear: "I" fingered a girl, "mom" is asleep, and the setting is "my mom's bedroom."
| There are many more even better ways to fix such problem, the example I gave was the one I can think of right now.
I wouldn't call this a "failure" nor would I say English is perfect for usages like these. Languages that lack pronoun have it no better either. Malay and Indonesian, for example, uses "dia" for both masculine and feminine pronoub.
And it's confusing.
| *pronoun. Gosh, I need to stop typing while having my meal.
| Now, colloquially, this would not be a problem. If this were a real conversation, you can ask who "she" in the sentence is; I do get the problem arising when we are using a written medium, however.
With that in mind, even today, years after my writing class has ended, I still have the principle of "clarifying before abbreviating" in mind. I don't apply it always, but when context is of concern, I feel that it is something I should remember.
| Sounds like language is a failure altogether.
| I don't speak inglish, but i try. And for all questions: i dont speak ingles
| Time to learn Lojban.
| >>99379
the technical term for this is structural ambiguity. you've formed a sentence which can be parsed to form more than one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parse_tree
like >>99401 suggested, then, you can limit the subset of english's grammar rules that you use so as to form limited grammars which are non-ambiguous and use them instead
| >>100981
as for the question of gender, a big part of why genders are often developed and retained in language is to cut down on the number of potential ambiguities, so, if you and the people you're speaking with can comfortably operate using more than two, doing so would definitely be another method of reducing ambiguity
| >>100981
Thank you for having the proper term here! I was looking it up myself, but I was too distracted and decide to think of the nearest-sounding term. (I'm the anon with pink ID that posted the messages up above)
| >>100990
ah, you're very welcome ^_^
would be nice to see more language-discussion like this on the internet in general
| >>100994
It would be very lovely. I'm not a linguist myself, but I adore threads that discuss faults and cracks of language, English in particular, because they give the users of the language a reflection on the language itself.
I haven't found many myself, the closest hub of discussions of similar nature are those hosted in Stack Exchange English forum. Though, to be fair, I haven't searched much about it on the internet either.
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| "I fingered a girl in my mom's bedroom while she was sleeping! My mom was sleeping..."
Someone explain why you can't tell who was sleeping in just the first sentence. Can we identify a grammar error that could be corrected? Could you, in one sentence, exclaim both who you fingered and who was sleeping while using the same number of pronouns? The character limit is not so bad because it forced me to articulate my words to be less wasteful! Which is a bad habbit I have...