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by finnish-food 1158 days ago
Could you give some examples in context of how this works? I’m interested in understanding the concept!
2 comments

In English, you can say something like "He ate it", but just saying "Ate" as an utterance by itself is ungrammatical. On the other hand, in Japanese and other "pro-drop" languages, you can freely omit pronouns unless they're necessary for disambiguation.

You can use pronouns in Japanese to clarify the subject or object of a verb, but it's not nearly as common to do as in English. For instance: when addressing somebody politely, you would typically refer to them either by name (with an appropriate honorific) if you know it, or a suitable title (like sensei for a teacher, or okyakusan for a customer). There are situations where you would instead use a second-person pronoun like anata, including as a fall-back if you don't know how else to address a stranger, but it's not at all the default choice as it is in English.

Another way this crops up is through the use of so-called "benefactive" constructions. For instance, hon wo kashite kureta could be translated as "[he/she/you] lent me a book", and hon wo kashite ageta means "I lent [him/her/you] a book". The difference has nothing to do with pronouns; it's that you use a different auxiliary verb when describing something that was done for the benefit of the speaker, or for the benefit of someone else.

Similarly, Japanese has a variety of honorific language which, in polite/formal situations, is used to speak respectfully about others and humbly about oneself (or one's "in-group", such as family members or coworkers). So the choice of wording can convey who you're talking about, without needing to explicitly use pronouns.

In Finnish, the smaller words get suffixed into the larger one. Take "talo", nominative for "house". In English you say "in (the) house", in Finnish the "-ssa" suffix means the same thing, so you say "talossa". "from (the) house" would be "talosta". There's like over 20 such modifications to the root word, and they compose. "from my house" would be "talostani", where the "-ni" suffix means "my".
I believe (correct me if I am wrong) Inuit, Seneca, and Hungarian are also in this category.

It gets even a larger swath when considering polysynthetic and fusional languages.