I am constrained by English to specify the flavour of genitals of the
coffee maker even though it is completely irrelevant to the process of
making coffee. That I call obsession with gender.
The proper way to put it is that English lacks a third-person singular
gender-neutral personal pronoun (quite a mouthful). Grammatical gender
is a relatively common concept (pervasive in the Indo-European tree in
particular), and appears to be quite universal for most agglutinative
languages.
English has another obsession. I discovered it when I learned
Esperanto which is even more obsessed. TIME. You can't talk about
anything happening without specifying past, present, future. You can
though say that something habitually happens, without specifying when.
It's not an obsession, strictly speaking. Often times, there exists a
form where one inflection is the default; this is the notion of
grammatical marking. If we consider gender for a moment, if I were to
discuss an actor, that tends to refer to an unknown person who may be
male or female, despite "actor" being a male version of the term. Only
if I use the female version "actress" would I definitely be referring to
a female; the female version is marked (it conveys additional
information). Similarly, tense in English can be unmarked: if I say "I
work for a living", that is actually ambiguous about time (it implies
that it happens on a consistent basis, but is ambivalent about if I am
presently in an action or not); compare that to "I am working for a living."
You may complain abut it being an obsession, but grammar and redundancy
in agreement do serve a useful purpose in that it allows for information
to be gleaned better from partial sources. Consider instead the trouble
of trying to work out what's happening in this sentence: "And when he
saw that he prevailed not against him..." There are two people A and B,
both male, and it requires a lot of context to work out if it should be
A/A/B or if it should be A/B/A.
Esperanto is like English in its concern with precise tense, gender
and plurality. It has some other obsessions of its own, roughly
equivalent to direct/indirect object though it has many other uses.
Esperanto is effectively a creole of various Indo-European languages,
and can be loosely described as speaking Latin words in a Slavic accent
with a basically Indo-European grammar system. English has a peculiarly
weak grammar (given its history) as a result of several invasions of its
islands by peoples from different regions of Europe.
I suppose Mandarin might become the next interlanguage as English
fades. Bahasa Indonesia was an early attempt at an interlanguage
devised by traders moving between thousands of islands. It is easy to
pronounce, and has a relatively simple grammar.
Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language, which is very difficult to master
for those whose language trees are not tonal, and its orthographic
complexity makes English's mess look simple. Given the pride many
Chinese have in having a hard-to-learn language, I doubt that Mandarin
Chinese will become a working lingua franca in the future.
