While hanging out with a friend the other day, I was on one of my long rants about something I was frustrated with. I don’t remember what we were talking about, but I do remember complaining about someone and saying something like, “You can’t just do that!” I was, of course, referring to whoever was bothering me, but my friend seemed insulted. His facial expression changed, and I could see an eye roll beginning to form. Before I could correct the semantic misunderstanding that had occurred, I realized I had stumbled upon an interesting linguistic phenomenon that I wanted to talk about in this week’s column.
The ambiguity of my sentence came from the lack of clarity in the type of “you” I had used. In spoken English, you usually use the pronoun “you” as a generic pronoun that is meant to refer to people in general. In formal English, one might use the word “one” to convey the same concept. To be clear, I wasn’t verbally attacking my friend as we were hanging out; I could have said, “One can’t just do that.” This would make it crystal clear that I am obnoxiously professing a general rule of human behavior, as opposed to telling him that he can’t be doing what he’s doing right now. But using this kind of formal construction would also make me sound pretentious and ridiculous in the casual setting of the conversation we were having.
The clunkiness of the impersonal construction in English got me thinking about how other languages accomplish this same meaning without the messy ambiguity that arises in English. The first example that came to mind was the impersonal “se” in Spanish. In Spanish, the original sentence that caused ambiguity could be said as: “No ‘se’ puede hacer eso.” The “se” in that sentence is a clear impersonal marker that means “one” or “a person.” The impersonal “se” is used all the time in everyday Spanish speech, and there’s a real beauty, simplicity and effectiveness that comes with it. You can use it in so many contexts without the ambiguity of the second person pronoun and the awkwardness of the passive voice: “It is not done to do this.” This construction is also way less formal than the “one can’t do that” is in English, so it’s much more natural to use in a normal conversation with a friend. From my inadequate research, it seems many other Romance languages as well as Slavic languages have similar grammatical devices in their languages.
Arabic takes a different approach to the impersonal sentence. A sentence like the one used in my conversation with a friend would be “لا يمكن فعل ذلك” (I think. I’m only in Arabic 3.). This version of the impersonal construction is also interesting because it contains the modal, impersonal verb يمكن, or yumkin, that doesn’t take a direct subject. The person doing the action can be specified with a pronoun suffix but not with a normal pronoun. This approach to the impersonal sentence is fascinating because it is unambiguous but also allows for the possibility of an agent with a suffix while the impersonal nature of the base verb never changes. There is a neat beauty to this.
English clearly does not handle this kind of impersonal structure as well as other languages — including Spanish and Arabic — because of the ambiguity that comes with using the second-person pronoun in this context. Yet this kind of structural ambiguity and clunkiness is part of why I love English. Its confusing pronoun structure spurs a short rift between friends and a whole column as opposed to the neat, but boring, solutions other languages offer.
