Great way to frame it. But it does rely on just chance that the nouns you’re talking about will slot into different categories. Would be much more useful if pronouns let us refer to ‘the previously mentioned subject’ or ‘the previously mentioned object’ rather than ‘the previously mentioned masculine person’.
Like in “John met David. He was delighted to meet him.” We have a conflict over the ‘masculine object’ register, so ‘he’ and ‘him’ are ambiguous.
But if we had a pronoun like ‘de/dim’ for ‘previous subject’ and ‘ne/nim’ for ‘previous object’ you could unabiguously say “John met David. De was delighted to make nis acquaintance, but ne wasn’t so keen”
Latin, does this. It's a bit of an unidiomatic construction, but roughly translated into Latin, you get:
> Ioannes Davido occurrit. Hunc occurrere illi placet.
Here it's clear that hunc refers to Davidus, since that's the closer name in the sentence, and illi refers to Ioannes, since that name sits further out.
Do you know if, if any language had such a system and it's intuitive enough, it is more likely to perpetuate than an inferior system? I was thinking about what makes a language spread but, short of the language being so poor that it causes the speakers to be outcompeted by other tribes with other languages (like if you couldn't convey where the attack is coming from before the enemy killed you), it seems to me entirely arbitrary. You speak whatever the person you want to talk to understands (and in rarer cases, what your oppressor tells you to speak), which is just a chance factor (whatever they grew up with) and not based on any quality of the language. I'm not aware of any case where both sides agreed to speak a different language for that language's efficacy and not just because they both speak it better
Like in “John met David. He was delighted to meet him.” We have a conflict over the ‘masculine object’ register, so ‘he’ and ‘him’ are ambiguous.
But if we had a pronoun like ‘de/dim’ for ‘previous subject’ and ‘ne/nim’ for ‘previous object’ you could unabiguously say “John met David. De was delighted to make nis acquaintance, but ne wasn’t so keen”