OK manchestercalling it seems you've caught a pretty major grammatical error unprotected in the wild. Now, do you replace the second if with it or add an it po

OK manchestercalling it seems you've caught a pretty major grammatical error unprotected in the wild. Now, do you replace the second if with it or add an it post second if? "if and only if" is a standard and well understood term in our rather wooly language, so we will probably need your missing "it" to complete the sentence. Note that nothing was lost anyway - both you and I could see what was going on. English is pretty close to stripped to the waist and holding both fists up already. There isn't much left to remove for conciseness with clarity and unambiguity. I think we need to keep the pronouns but they can often be dropped with minimal loss of clarity. If we lost pronouns wholesale, we'd have to get pretty weird on suffixes or the like. Before you know it - you are speaking German or Dutch instead of our unholy brew of pretty much every language that has been seen on the continent and cuddled up to nearly every other language in the world. (The last time I saw JB in the flesh was 1977 when I was seven and lived in Wythenshawe for a year in between parental postings to exotic lands like W Germany - it looked like science fiction to me then and it still looks rather impressive now)