Is there any natural language (active or dead) that has successfully handled the so-called “gay porn problem”? You can see the problem in the following sentence.
“As George and Bill sat quietly, he placed his hand on his thigh.”
Well, who placed whose hand on whose thigh? Note that the problem does not exist for mixed sexes.
“As George and Rhonda sat quietly, she placed her hand on his thigh.”
For mixed sexes, any combination of pronouns will render a clear meaning: “…he placed his hand on her thigh,” “…he placed her hand on his thigh,” “…she placed his hand on her thigh.” And now, in the context of mixed sexes, even “…he placed his hand on his thigh” tells us exactly what happened.
The problem is not limited to porn, of course, as in “George and Bill decided to play some football, so he threw the ball to him.” That’s just what the phenomenon is called.
“It is lucky for rulers that men do not think.” — Adolf Hitler
Yeah, I gotta admit, I don’t see this as a problem. Any writer worth his ink knows that reworkink an unclear sentence like the original example is the best way to handle this. No offense meant if you wrote the original sentence, Libertarian, but the placement of the pronouns and their antecedents is pretty shoddy, and could be reworked without any significant problem or effort.
Then he said, “That is that.”
And then he was gone.
-Dr. Seuss, * The Cat in the Hat*
Well, in Latin you can solve the problem by using “hic” for one guy and “ille” for the other. When it comes to gay menage-a-trois porn, you still have a problem, but under such circumstances I wouldn’t necessarily be thinking about grammar anyway.
“Don’t take life too serious, son – it ain’t nohow permanent.”
No offense taken. I ran into the problem when researching artificial languages. A linguist mentioned it with an example similar to the one I gave, but offered no solution and no history.
The simple example in the OP is probably reworkable, but with many antecedal references in a single paragraph, the problem amplifies greatly.
“It is lucky for rulers that men do not think.” — Adolf Hitler
But how do you know, from that sentence whether George placed Bill’s hand on George’s thigh or on Bill’s own thigh? Since it was a problem addressed in the context of constructing artificial languages, and after giving the matter considerable thought, I really do believe the problem is a genuine linguistic ambiquity, and not just a matter of writing technique.
“It is lucky for rulers that men do not think.” — Adolf Hitler
I’m no expert linguist, but I suspect that this problem is not solvable, because it is a direct result of (1) the author’s choice to use pronouns rather than nouns, and (2) in the language of the author’s choice, the same pronouns apply to both subjects (objects?) of the sentence.
As the OP pointed out, this problem does not exist when two different sexes are involved. But gender is only one aspect of the pronoun; number is another. The problem will exist if both are plural, but not if one is singular and the other is plural.
Example: “The Yankees played against the Mets, and they were sad that they won.” The two "they"s refer to different teams, and it is not clear who won.
Example: “The Yankees played against the Mets, and they were happy that they won.” The two "they"s refer to the same team, and it is still not clear who won.
Example: “The Yankees’ manager watched the Yankees play against the Mets, and he was happy that they won.” The two "they"s refer to different teams, but you can figure out from context that the “they” refers to the Yankees.
Let it be known that I am not bigotted against gays (or anyone else), and that, as a Libertarian, I believe peaceful honest people should be free to pursue their own happiness in their own way. I fail to see how a phrase, commonly used by linguists, can possibly be considered against the rules at a site where the “F” word, and other verbal trash, is slung around routinely. I do, however, respect the right of the moderator, as an authorized representative of the site owner, to do as he pleases.
Keeves
The simple examples shown here so far were merely intended to illustrate the so-called gay porn problem. The problem is greatly exacerbated when you try to extend same sex references for an entire paragraph. Try, for example, to take the story of George and Bill for any length, and you will soon discover that you lose all track of who is doing what to whom unless you eschew pronouns altogether, in which case the writing becomes clumbsier than a rhino in a flower garden.
“It is lucky for rulers that men do not think.” — Adolf Hitler
Many thanks to whoever changed the title of this thread. Far too many threads have vague titles which are either misleading or have nothing at all to do with the contents of the thread. I end up looking in many more threads than I really want to, just to see what they are about. I wish people would be more considerate.
I understand and I agree. My point was only that the problem is inherent to the nature of pronouns, and it will exist more severely in languages which have a few general pronouns, and it will exist less severely in languages which have many specialized pronouns.
Example: "John saw his wife standing on his yacht and said, “Boy, is she beautiful!’” It is ambiguous here, whether John is commenting on his wife’s beauty, or the boat’s beauty. This is because boats are among the few inanimate objects which are informally accepted as having a gender in English.
The above example would not be ambiguous in English if the wife were standing on a street, or a truck, or almost anything else. But in other languages, which lack an “it”, and in which all nouns are gendered, “She is beautiful” would still be ambiguous, for all cases where the wife was standing on a feminine noun.
