A Cool Linguistic Feature I Wish We Had in English
Or, why writing dialogue in English can get really annoying
Ever notice how it’s a little annoying to write dialogue between people of the same gender in English? Dialogue like, “He (Person A) said this. Then he (Person B) said that.”
You have to repeatedly clarify which ‘he’ you’re referring to by stating the names of the characters (Person A or Person B) because our personal pronouns only encode gender. But notice how it’s not unclear which ‘this’ and which ‘that’ we’re referring to…
Now, I want to introduce you to Tamil, which encodes gender as well as distance in personal pronouns!
Proximate Pronouns
Like English, Tamil has two distances. For example: here vs. there / this vs. that.
‘Here’ in English is ‘Inga’ in Tamil
‘There’ in English is ‘Anga’ in Tamil
‘This’ in English is ‘Idu’ in Tamil
‘That’ in English is ‘Adu’ in Tamil
Note: The ‘A’ vowel here marks a neutral “uh” sound or a ‘schwa sound’
The ‘I’ vowel here marks the "short i" like the ‘i’s in ‘sit’ or ‘if’
However, Tamil retains these distance markers for personal pronouns!
The two pronouns for ‘he’ (male nominative) in Tamil is: Ivan and Avan.
Ivan is the ‘he’ that’s closer to me, and Avan is the ‘he’ that’s further from me.
‘Avan’ pronounced kinda like ‘oven.’
‘Ivan’ pronounced kinda like “If N” but with a v instead of an f.
So in English we might say, “He said this. He said that” and lose track of which “he” we’re talking about.
But in Tamil, we can say “Ivan said this. Avan said that,” and as long as we’re consistent about who ‘Ivan’ and ‘Avan’ are, we don’t have to keep repeating their names to clarify which is which!
I ended my tiktok on this subject by suggesting, in jest, that we could apply this to English.
Carrying over how distances are distinguished in ‘This’ and ‘That', I suggest a Him and a Ham!
(Har har har)
Other Notes (For Pedants and Linguistics Nerds)
I’m going off this guidebook to colloquial Tamil by choosing to call “Ivan” and “Avan” “proximate” pronouns. I can’t find many references to other sources using this term. But I couldn’t really find any other name that described it as well either. I speak Tamil in the literary register too poorly to tell you if there’s a name for this feature in Tamil itself.
I’ve often gotten the question, “What about if there are more than 2 people?” Sadly, Tamil, like English, only has only two distances. So we can only really track two people of the same gender using regular pronouns. Spanish has 3 distances (aquí, ahí and allí: here, there, and over there) but, like English, doesn’t apply distance markers to personal pronouns. Malgasey apparently has a whopping seven distances! I leave finding out if they apply distances to personal pronouns as an exercise for the reader.
My attempts to transliterate Tamil to the English script are based on the guidebook mentioned above but also simply on my personal vibes (my lifelong experience reading texts from my family written in Tam-lish.) There’s no formal, pinyin-like, or even more generally agreed-upon Arabizi-like system for it in Tamil (that I’m aware of!).