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I just had to rewrite a sentence in an e-mail because of our hopelessly depleted English language.
The sentence: We really enjoyed dinner celebrating our birthdays.
The problem: 1st person plural pronouns
The paraphrase: My wife and I really enjoyed our time together over dinner celebrating our birthdays.
The circumstances: My friend and I share a birthday, and my wife, my friend, and I went out to dinner to celebrate. I was e-mailing my friend.
OK. So what if the paraphrase is lots better anyway? That will always happen when you take the time to rewrite something. Mostly. Sometimes. Maybe.
Still, there are languages in which my original version would have been perfectly fine and clear. Some languages do have multiple forms for 1st person singular. We (I, along with someone other than you) really enjoyed dinner celebrating our (my and your) birthday dinner.
Even as I paraphrased it, I used our with two distinct referents: … our time …(you, me, my wife) together; … our birthdays (you and me). I'm not sure if there is any formal prohibition of that practice, but it seems that clarity would lead a good writer to avoid it.
But, I guess, not me.
Not too foreign, just too little known. My bet is that the only way a fix will be adopted into English is if a language that has a solution to the problem becomes influential enough in an English-speaking country that the Anglophones there start using it, and it spreads. In that case it's just another loan word, whose origins most will have forgotten within a generation or two. In the USA, Spanish has enough influence that it could conceivably work—except that Spanish has the same problem as English in this regard.
But if we're fixing English—don't get me wrong, it'd be nice to have different versions of "we" that make the referents clear, but to my mind it's much more urgent that we start distinguishing between singular and plural "you".
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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