• Lumidaub@feddit.org
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      23 hours ago

      ndupont ha kaban wo totta

      ndupont took bag [kaban = bag, totta = took]

      Whose bag did ndupont take? Presumably their own but that’s an additional mental step that Japanese native speakers do which isn’t necessary when you have a pronoun in there indicating ownership. And even Japanese can do that in order to prevent this kind of ambiguity:

      ndupont ha kare/kanojo no kaban wo totta.

      ndupont took his/her bag.

      Which of course still only tells you if ndupont took someone else’s bag if the pronoun isn’t ndupont’s but it works in most cases.

      To further decrease ambiguity you could do this:

      ndupont ha jibun no kaban wo totta

      ndupont took (his/her/their) own bag

      So just because you can get through the day without pronouns most of the time and many languages do just that, they do doesn’t mean they don’t serve a purpose. Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

      Edit: forgot how I began that sentence halfway through.