"Suppose Adam is tall and Bob is short. Maybe English ought to have different pronouns for men of different heights (or hair colour, or...). It would help relie

"Suppose Adam is tall and Bob is short. Maybe English ought to have different pronouns for men of different heights (or hair colour, or...). It would help relieve this terrible ambiguity here. And yet we get by without this precision in our pronouns" Hm... Let me hijack the current state of languages the other way around: why would we have distinctions at all? Why would we need to express distinctively about animate and inanimate, or about the existing number of colors (when the entire spectrum can be botched to fewer hue names), or to make a distinction between single and non-single (English "you" FYI), or a lot of other stupid differences that force us to think about when we're communicating? Why wouldn't we drop them and market this as a feature, emphasizing the fact that we can speak that way "just fine"? Actually, you know what? Why wouldn't we drop communication entirely?! That would be a wonderful final goal, wouldn't it? I may sound like trolling, but it's important to see the whole picture - the goal of the communicating act in its essence is to transmit perceived distinctions. Now, we can shape the language used for this communication by pushing it either in one direction - of evolution (by gaining the ability to make even more distinctions), which is an open end indeed and that may seem overwhelming, or in the other direction - involution, which (hey, good for us -) has only so much to be reduced to! Science (including the part addressing languages) is a bitch, isn't it? We have one less linguistic aspect available for politics now!