Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
Another linguistics note: Has anyone else noticed how eliding the subject (in this case "I") seems to have become more and more acceptable in English over the last 10 years? Wonder if anyone has written about this trend.
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Thomas
@aviationdoctor.eth
Interestingly, Latin and its closest descendants (Italian, Portuguese, Spanish) make the subject pronoun optional because the conjugation of the verb makes it obvious. In French, which is also quite close to Latin, or English, which borrows ~80% of its words from Latin, pronouns have been non-optional until this trend
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Thomas
@aviationdoctor.eth
There’s actually academic research on this: “The theory of pronoun-drop effect posits that languages that allow their speakers to drop subject pronouns in verbal communication would lead their speakers to create collectivistic culture” https://doi.org/kndz
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Thomas
@aviationdoctor.eth
Also, the use of pronoun drop (pro-drop) is more frequent in high-contact English speakers (i.e. those natively exposed to a second language), which is the case of Elon growing up in the (British) schooling system in South Africa; relative to low-contact speakers like British or Americans - see https://doi.org/knd2
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simon
@sa
There's a great book from about ten years ago related to this. "The Secret Life of Pronouns" https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Secret_Life_of_Pronouns.html?id=OWfMNeXw13oC&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&gboemv=1&ovdme=1#v=onepage&q&f=false
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antimo 🎩
@antimofm.eth
Thanks for sharing that, very interesting reading
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