Hacker News Reader

Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

I wish everyone was just named James. I had a good friend named James and it’s much easier to call everyone that than to learn a bunch of individual names.

View on HN

The whole point of pronouns is to reduce cognitive overhead. If pronouns become something you have to remember for each person then you might as well drop them from the language and use names all the time.

Totally. Or use X for everyone. No overloading of common words well understood to be something completely different.

Yes exactly: James for everyone.

Some people may prefer a different name but I think they’ll understand once we explain the cognitive load.

James thinks James meant "James'll understand" instead of "they'll understand" :P

It makes sense to me that individuals should have names. Pronouns tend to be much less information dense, and are used as shorthand. It doesn't make sense to me that pronouns should capture gender, as opposed to hair color, height, or age.

If we could simply convince the entire world to speak either Persian or Bengali, we could avoid the whole problem.

The property that pronouns capture is essentially arbitrary. That's why Romance languages assign gender to stuff like telephones and sandwiches.

The point of gendered pronouns is that sentences very often have two nouns: a subject and object. If you have only a single pronoun, then any sentence can only use a pronoun to unambiguously refer to one of those. If you have two pronouns and you randomly and evenly distribute them across various subjects, then it's fairly likely that the subject and object will get difference ones and you can now unambiguously use pronouns for both.

Since a very large fraction of human speech pertains to other humans and since human sex is a roughly 50/50 distribution, it makes some sense that we used gender as our mostly arbitrary thing to assign a pair of pronouns too. We could have used, say handedness instead, but with only ~10% of people being left-handed, the odds of a sentence being about a righty and a lefty is much smaller.

Pronouns are basically like special variables in a REPL that let you refer to the most recent expression. It's nice if you can refer back to a couple of them.

Why even use articles or pronouns, a better way would be to unambiguously mark every word with whether they're the object subject or whatever role it is in the sentence. Maybe tack on more flags as you need them for more information as needed

Hence why forcing my team to learn Hungarian has really been a no brainer and will really start to pay dividends in the next decade when we finally reach a working professional proficiency

> mark every word with whether they're the object subject or whatever role it is in the sentence

No, that's not the point. (Most languages do make subject/object fairly clear.)

The point of pronouns is to have a short alias to refer to a previously introduced noun.

Well, it certainly is a much stronger disambiguater than those other signals. Dividing a population in half is a pretty powerful technique.

Though now that I think about it age is also potent - you get the same rough division w.r.t relative age (younger vs older than the speaker), and you can divide the population roughly into quarters with ease and accuracy. Do miss and ma'am count as pronouns here? They code for age as well as gender

Hair color and height dont really have the same sort of dividing power broadly speaking.

Still, your line of thought there about what a pronoun should capture is intriguing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com