by pandunia-guru » 2025-02-11 18:12
We had a long and heated debate about the pronoun /hə/ in Reddit and Discord forums. Most of it was because of its unfortunate spelling, he, which looks exactly like the English masculine pronoun. I summarize here some of my thinking.
My main point was and is that he is a compromise form of the English pronouns (he, she, him, her, his, her) – mainly phonetically, but one can't avoid seeing the similarity of the written forms in good and bad. The pronoun /hə/ is important, because English speaking people (especially those who have learned it for international communication) are supposed to understand spoken Pandunia to a significant extent without having to guess too much. Due to its high frequency, the 3rd person singular pronoun is one of the most important words for fluent comprehension. Relatively infrequent words, like world and chair, are less important for mutual intelligibility and can be borrowed from other languages. However, this doesn't change the fact that there are a lot of content words that are common to Pandunia and English. For one unfamiliar drink word, water, there are many familiar drink words, like coffee, beer, juice, cola, wine and whisky, because they are really international even if we don't count English.
We had a long and heated debate about the pronoun /hə/ in Reddit and Discord forums. Most of it was because of its unfortunate spelling, [i]he[/i], which looks exactly like the English masculine pronoun. I summarize here some of my thinking.
My main point was and is that [i]he[/i] is a compromise form of the English pronouns ([i]he, she, him, her, his, her[/i]) – mainly phonetically, but one can't avoid seeing the similarity of the written forms in good and bad. The pronoun /hə/ is important, because English speaking people (especially those who have learned it for international communication) are supposed to understand spoken Pandunia to a significant extent without having to guess too much. Due to its high frequency, the 3rd person singular pronoun is one of the most important words for fluent comprehension. Relatively infrequent words, like [i]world[/i] and [i]chair[/i], are less important for mutual intelligibility and can be borrowed from other languages. However, this doesn't change the fact that there are a lot of content words that are common to Pandunia and English. For one unfamiliar drink word, [i]water[/i], there are many familiar drink words, like [i]coffee, beer, juice, cola, wine[/i] and [i]whisky[/i], because they are really international even if we don't count English.
