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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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
I don't really count Latin descendants as "real" subject elision because as you say the pronoun is still there in the verb ending. But Japanese on the other hand...
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Thomas
@aviationdoctor.eth
Got it - I don’t speak Japanese, so cannot comment. Though in Elon’s English case above, does it mean that “Am lifting weights” is not subject elision because “Am” is necessarily first person, whereas “Don’t have time” is true subject elision because the subject could be either “I” or “You”?
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Jonathan Shomroni
@shomroni
In Hebrew we (can) omit the subject pronoun but only in past and future tenses. In present tense (we only have three tenses: past, present future) we keep it! Still exists implicitly in the verb’s suffix, like in Latin.
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