And here's the thing: Just like the boss's son, if dummy pronouns went away tomorrow, it wouldn't affect productivity at all. That's what makes dummy pronouns so, well, dumb. They're completely unnecessary. Plenty of other language have figured this out and dropped them entirely. Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Turkish speakers all learned eons ago that saying "raining" is just as effective as saying "it's raining," or that you can just say "lot of people outside the cafe" without anything being lost. In fact, if you verbally say "lot of people outside the cafe" in English, it also sounds fine.
There's no reason English has arbitrarily decided to keep hanging on to dummy pronouns. They serve absolutely no purpose, we'd get by equally fine without them, and they keep spending company funds on cocaine.
1
How We Even Learn Language At All
This sounds nuts, but one of the least-understood elements of any language is how we acquire it. The human faculty for language is untouched by any other species, yet, as in the case of the intervocalic alveolar flapping in the introduction up there, humans are absolute dogshit at explicitly knowing the rules of their own language. So how do we teach our kids how to speak? Do we even teach kids to speak, or is this a Maybelline situation, where they're just born with it? Short answer: We don't know. Long answer: We have some theories.
Noam Chomsky argues that language is innate and comes pre-loaded into the brain, so when your kid arrives, you can just switch 'em on and they'll have the framework to learn whatever it is you're speaking. On the other end of the spectrum is the idea that we are born blank slates, and that every single thing we know about language is imparted to us by our parents and teachers -- otherwise known as linguistic empiricism. But there are some major flaws with both of those.
If humans were born with absolutely no preexisting framework for language, there's no way we would learn language as quickly as we do. The going rate for human fluency is that by three years, all healthy children are saying sentences that are grammatically correct 90 percent of time. There's no way we get these just by what our parents have taught us. Have you met most parents? Absolute shitshows. On the other hand, the idea that babies are born pre-loaded with software like an iPhone seems equally weird, although there are more supporting arguments to that than you'd think.
For example, all children, regardless of the language they're speaking, learn it in similar stages. Meaning that at one year, a child has a vocabulary of about 50 words, regardless of whether those words are Chinese, Greek, Tagalog, or English. At a year and a half, those same kids can differentiate between nouns and verbs. A rate of acquisition that quick can't simply be explained by good parenting, and this universal process is even more granular than that.
When it comes to pairs of opposites (long versus short, deep versus shallow, big versus little), studies show that children universally learn what's called the "positive member" before they learn the "negative member." Therefore, children know the concept of "long" before "short," "deep" before "shallow," and "big" before "little." For something that specific to be applicable in all languages across the globe, you know there has to be some degree of underlying framework at play. But obviously, that framework isn't complete, because if taken to the extreme, that would mean a Chinese baby adopted by Spanish-speaking parents would end up speaking Mandarin, since it's what they gestated with.
So yeah, if you want a new subject to bitterly argue with strangers about, study languages.
English too hard? Want to learn a new language? Try picking up one with Rosetta Stone.
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For more, check out 6 Language Tricks Your Brain Falls For Every Time and 6 Insane Prejudices People Have Based On How You Talk.
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