Comments by "Mentat" (@_Mentat) on "NativLang"
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None of those examples entices me. We don't need them. There are somethings we could usefully use. In some languages you can make a unit noun from any number. We have dozen (12), score (20) and gross (144) but if I want a noun for 25 there's no word for that. Also, we're missing some tenses. We need a couple of narrative tenses. All our novels are written in the past tense. And if you're writing about events in your future but will be in the readers' past you're challenged - you have to use the present tense even though it's wrong, eg my birthday will be/was/is on a Monday this year. I need a my birthday verb-to-be on Monday this year which works before, during and after my birthday.
Speaking of which we could just regularise the verb to be. It's not ambiguous to say: I be, you be, he/she/it be.
On the plus side, English can be deliberately ambiguous or very precise. If i say, "I went to the hospital and saw a doctor", did I see a male doctor or a female doctor? You don't know. I could have chosen to include that information but I didn't. Some languages would automatically reveal that information. However, if I then use a pronoun for the doctor I would have to specify the sex. We need a non-specific singular pronoun to stop people having to use the plural.
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