You can add one word to the vocabulary / general use, what would it be?
Any explanation / meaning / backstory is more than welcome, or you can just drop it for everyone to try and resolve.
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In Danish we have two different words for the pronoun "his" (or equivalent). In English you say:
Tom gave Steve his phone.
Which person's phone is it? In Danish that would be clear depending if you used sit or hans
Im not sure if the example sentence is legitimate or not but its uncomfortable for my brain.
I probably would have said "Tom gave Steve his phone back" (steve ownership) or "Tom gave his phone to Steve" (tom ownership)
Right, in English you have to rephrase the sentence because the pronoun you need doesn't exist. There's just a pronoun for "male person" not one for "subject" or "object" of the sentence.
That's why I replied with it to a "what word would you make up?" Question, because that's what I would bring into English
Also, for what it's worth, it feels a lot more natural with mixed genders here to me:
Steve gave Christina his phone
Meen pronoons err sit/hans
This, and the lack of inclusive and exclusive 1st person plural, are the biggest oversights in English.
Oh! Like "we with you" and "we not you" ?
Yes.
Speaker + listener + maybe others
Speaker + not listener others
But that now seems small fry compared to the differentiating subject and object's possessive adjectives.
Hans is a pronoun in Danish? To me that will always be a name.