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Comment by juujian | Hacker News Reader

I mean, how do I even know what I say before I said it? Speaking is such a social act, you can definitely pan out and say a few words (even if it's fillers) before your brain catches up and you create a plan. And then you adjust your plan based on audience response. The obsession with precision is strange. Vagueness in spoken language is a feature, not a bug. It makes social situations easier to navigate if you have an "out".

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Different languages are precise and vague in different domains.

For example English requires articles. You can have a book or the book. You cannot just have book. In my native language we don't have articles. If I want to specify it's "a" book I can (with the word to the effect of "some"), if I want to specify it's "the" book I can (with the equivalent of "this" or "that"). But by default we don't care.

On the other hand every verb encodes gender in my language. So when author wrote in English "Somebody in the audience said >I was with you<" - the translator has to guess what was the gender of that person. Because "was" is a different word depending on the gender of that person :)

EDIT: I'm -> I was, because in present tense verbs can be the same :)

What's your native language?

I'd guess it's one of the non-Southern Slavic languages (e.g. Polish or Russian): those languages repurposed what used to be past participles (and so, just like adjectives, had genders) to be past tense verbs themselves. The Southern ones (e.g. Bulgarian) did not do this.

Yup, Polish.

Past tense in Russian also has gender. I was => был for the masculine case but to была for a female subject.

Not caring whether it is a book or the book pales in comparison to not caring whether it's foot or leg.

Love that example.

Or hand/arm, or finger/thumb: for some reason, while in Polish na ręce jest 5 palców, in English a hand has 4 fingers and 1 thumb on it, what's the deal with it?

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