How many potatoes do you eat on average in a year. Think about it how likely that people would eat exactly the same amount of potatoes on average in a year way less likely than people having the same name or gender. Or if you don’t like remembering the long number shorten it. Con: Lithuanians would have pronouns as long as their geolocation
Distance. You’d have proximate and distal pronouns, like this and that.
Linguistics, just like in our world. The purpose of pronouns is to reduce repetition in speech and writing.
Additional gendered aspect is there for easier disambiguation between multiple people’s pronouns when mentioned in the same context.
I mean, yeah, that’s why I’m asking. Since it’s beneficial to have several pronouns based on a person’s intrinsic characteristics, a genderless society would also end up with several - but the question is, what would they base these pronouns on? Their age? Their role in society? Their personality?
There are some interesting comments about how other languages do it in other threads.
Here’s one more idea - is this person present or not during the conversation
Edit to expand on the idea:
We can have 3 pronouns- Person participates in the conversation
- Person doesn’t participate but is somehow involved with speakers and conversation (like talking about a friend, or a customer that bothered you at work)
- Talking about someone in an abstract sense. Like when writing about a celebrity, or a biography, or describing someone’s life (even if a friend)
You can just as easily do without any gendered pronouns, like some languages do already
At the very least in the number, English and its almost non existent verbal conjugations is awful in that regard. When someone says you I need quite some context to know if it is talking to me or to a group of people where I’m included, it is even worse with they.
They would all be non-gendered pronouns.
“I”, “you”, and"we" are singular pronouns with no gender specification. They/Them, while
technicallycommonly taught as plural,has taken on the role ofis being used more often as a singular pronoun. Whatever takes the place of he/she would be something we simply don’t associate a gender or sex with.They had always been both singular and plural. Wiktionary says the singular for a person previously referred to where gender is irrelevant or unknown had been around since the 14th century
The only new singular variant is where the person identifies as non-binary
Alright, guess we need to add “they is plural” to that thread about lies school taught you from a few days ago.
status, like they already are in many languages
What languages base their pronouns on status? I’d like to read about them.
In my native Czech we use plural when addressing strangers or people with a higher standing. Singular pronouns are a lot more informal, used betwen friends and family. French and German have something similar.
Actually, English does the same, except the uncouth singular has been dropped and now the formal address is the only choice. The informal, singular version of “you” is “thou”.
You can read more about it here
May or may not be related, but English used to make use of the thorn character for many instances of “th” in modern times, but it wasn’t available on german printing presses so “y” was often used instead, which i think was a contributing factor to “thou” going out of favor since itd always be “you” when printed.
“Y’all” has become more popular over the last decade in english for sure, somewhat reinstating an informal option for plural. It very much used to be a southern US thing, but its increasingly being adopted as a way to replace gendered english words when addressing a group directly. The article you liked mentions that a bit, tho i don’t know if anyone has done the work to determine how much that adoption has increased.
Spanish is one. Western Hemisphere Spanish has different second-person singular pronouns depending on relative status / formality / familiarity. One uses “tu” for inferiors, intimates, and children, and “usted” for superiors and respected strangers. Spain does as well, but they also have variants for second person plural pronouns.
Japanese for example. Pronouns like he (kare 彼) or she (kanojo 彼女) aren’t used as frequently as in English or many other western languages. Usually it is familyname + status-suffix.
For example: Smith-San(さん) -> Mr/Mrs Smith
Tanaka-Sama(様) -> Very respectful form of adress
Aoyama-Sensei(先生) -> Teacher/Doctor/Artist
To any native/professional speaker: correct me if I’m wrong.
The latter three (~さん・様・先生) aren’t really pronouns, though. Sensei can technically function as such when we already know which one is being discussed, but you would never use the other two on their own. These are titles/honorifics.
彼・彼女 are pronounce. We also have others こいつ・あいつ・and basically whateverqualifier人 (あの人・その人).
Japanese does this, and doesn’t half-ass it either! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronouns_in_Japanese#List_of_Japanese_personal_pronouns
Hell, Japanese essentially has entire modes of speaking just to be polite, with whole sets of pronouns, verbs and speaking style. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorific_speech_in_Japanese
Incidentally, from a Euro perspective, tons of “our” languages, and formerly English (thou/thee) have what is called a t-v distinction, named after Latin “you” (tu/vi) which depends on status much like “usted” in Spanish. There’s a list of languages which do this.
Just to be clear, the Wikipedia list is simply trying to be exhaustive and points out which ones are a matter of dialect and what’s just an archaic form. Think of it like a list that includes you, ye, ya, y’all, u, thou. Those are not different pronouns - it’s the same word with variations for regions, time periods, medium. Don’t take “you can just write ‘u’ when you are writing on an electronic device” as a formal rule.
Vietnamese uses both status and gender. For example, there are different terms associated with older brother (anh) or sister (chi) vs younger siblings (em). You generally wouldn’t use any of those terms to address someone older than your generation, as there are more respectful pronouns you would use.
There’s a relevant bit in The Player of Games from The Culture series. It purports that the book you’re reading is actually translated from the original Marain (in-universe language), and has been adapted suitably:
Still with me?
Little textual note for you here (bear with me).
Those of you unfortunate enough not to be reading or hearing this in Marain may well be using a language without the requisite number or type of personal pronouns, so I’d better explain that bit of the translation.
Marain, the Culture’s quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person’s sex in Marain, but they’re not used in everyday conversation; in the archetypal language-as-moral-weapon-and-proud-of-it, the message is that it’s brains that matter, kids; gonads are hardly worth making a distinction over.
So, in what follows, Gurgeh is quite happily thinking about the Azadians just as he’d think about any other (see list above)… But what of you, O unlucky, possibly brutish, probably ephemeral and undoubtedly disadvantaged citizen of some unCultured society, especially those unfairly (and the Azadians would say under-) endowed with only the mean number of genders?!
How shall we refer to the triumvirate of Azadian sexes without resorting to funny-looking alien terms or gratingly awkward phrases not-words?
…. Rest at ease; I have chosen to use the natural and obvious pronouns for male and female, and to represent the intermediates - or apices - with whatever pronominal term best indicates their place in their society, relative to the existing sexual power-balance of yours. In other words, the precise translation depends on whether your own civilisation (for let us err on the side of terminological generosity) is male or female dominated.
(Those which can fairly claim to be neither will of course have their own suitable term.)
Anyway, enough of that.
Banks was ahead of his time in so many ways. What an absolutely brilliant writer.
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“If my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike!”
I assume we are talking about third person pronouns, mostly singular, possibly plural (like in French which has gendered ils/elles). First and second person (I, you, we) aren’t gendered in (most?) western languages anyway.
It could go multiple ways:
- Just one set of third person pronouns for everyone, equivalent to English they/them. The fewer different pronouns you have, the harder it is to talk about multiple people at once but in principle, it works. After all, nobody keeps you from talking about five men who all use he/him in English, you just have to add more specifiers or names to differentiate.
- A distinction based on proximity. One set of pronouns for a person near the speaker, one for a person near the listener and one for a person somewhere else. Japanese does something similar for things (これ kore, それ sore, あれ are) but as far as I know, not for people. For an example in English, imagine equivalents to this and that which are personal pronouns instead of demonstratives.
- A distinction based on age. Different pronouns for children, adults, elderly or relative to the speaker’s age.
- A distinction based on familiarity. One set of pronouns to refer to close friends and family, one for acquaintances, one for strangers.
- A distinction based on status and respect. A bit similar to what Japanese does with honorific name suffixes but in pronoun form.
- One of the conlangs I’m occasionally working on has pronouns based on the shortened form of names: the first syllable of the person’s name plus a suffix. Plus one set of pronouns for if you don’t know (or don’t want to mention) a person’s name.
A distinction based on age. Different pronouns for children, adults, elderly or relative to the speaker’s age.
That’s the one I thought about after posting.
A distinction based on status and respect. A bit similar to what Japanese does with honorific name suffixes but in pronoun form.
It could actually be the evolved version of the age-based pronouns. The pronouns for older people become the pronouns for respectable individuals and stuff like that.
A distinction based on proximity. One set of pronouns for a person near the speaker, one for a person near the listener and one for a person somewhere else. Japanese does something similar for things (これ kore, それ sore, あれ are) but as far as I know, not for people.
A distinction based on familiarity. One set of pronouns to refer to close friends and family, one for acquaintances, one for strangers.
I like these weirdly practical pronouns! I can imagine them in a language of a highly rational alien species.
One of the conlangs I’m occasionally working on has pronouns based on the shortened form of names: the first syllable of the person’s name plus a suffix. Plus one set of pronouns for if you don’t know (or don’t want to mention) a person’s name.
I’d argue that shortened names aren’t pronouns. Like, “Bob” isn’t a pronoun after all. But that’s a cool idea nonetheless.
I’d argue that shortened names aren’t pronouns. Like, “Bob” isn’t a pronoun after all. But that’s a cool idea nonetheless.
Counter-argument: the only two reasons why “Bob” isn’t a pronoun are a) because English has other pronouns and b) because not every name has a form that’s short enough to use in place of pronouns.
I would say it’s fully plausible that a language develops proper pronouns (with case markings and everything else you would expect) based on a rule that works with any name. As an arbitrary example, a Robert, Robin, Ronald and Rocinante might all use roki for the nominative case, ros for the genitive case and ron for the accusative case. In the absence of other pronoun systems, that would be indistinguishable from what you imagine as pronouns. Add a few centuries of sound shifts and you get something really interesting.
I like these weirdly practical pronouns! I can imagine them in a language of a highly rational alien species.
This is how it works in Armenian - their personal pronouns are genderless and based on deixis (here, there, over there).
When names are known I think names and “they” are enough. When names are unknown a pronoun separated by age could be useful to pick someone out of a crowd. When talking about a bunch of unknown people of similar age, perhaps something referring to their order of appearance?
“What do you think those people over there were talking about? First said something to Second who laughed, but Third didn’t seem amused. First nudged Third but they just picked up their phone and First left them alone. Second said something general and shrugged. About two minutes later Third interrupted First and Second to show them the phone which seemed to prove what First had said was wrong. Fourth joined just as First left for the bathroom.”
In T Kingfisher’s novel What Moves the Dead, society has extra pronouns for soldiers (and some other groups, but I can’t remember who; doctors maybe). So if you enlist, you’re not longer him or her, you’re ka.
CS2 rank
Personhood.
Itd just be the “singular they” that English was using even before Shakespeare and other languages like Chinese still use.
It’s weird how many people get worked up about it now. It’s literally always correct and removes what’s almost always extrenous information.
Exactly
It’s just always been ironic the two groups most opposed to it are the most extreme on either side of the issue
If he/she disappeared tomorrow and everyone just always used “they”, >95% of us wouldn’t care.
But ~5% of people would probably be really really pissed. Because they’ve made the entire idea of gender and sexuality their entire personality.
That stuff being tribialized never works out well for any of us. We need to aim for society where it just really doesn’t matter.
The only true equality is people genuinely not giving a fuck about it. And the first step to that is abolishing the distinction that language places between genders. As long as language draws a line, the human brain wants to put everyone on one side or the other.
If there’s no line, there’s no division.
That would require a lot of pronouns! But sounds interesting ngl
Nah, it’s just a single differentiation between people and non-persons, e.g. him vs that.
There are gender-free languages that still make this distinction, e.g. Hungarian ő vs az.
To add to the subject of complexity, in English you have 3 genders, 2 numbers (singular/plural), and 4 cases, totalling a maximum of 24 pronouns. A gender-free language would just set the first factor to 1. Adding differentiation by e.g. status would increment (in cases of there being one extra formal gender for the 3rd person) or multiply it (when there are different versions for all pronouns).
Ah thanks for the clarification! I completely misread the comment somehow lol.
They/them, the standard pronouns that have been part of the English language since it was spoken in a way completely unintelligible to people today.
You wouldn’t really need them. Just by watching a bunch of anime last year I came to guess that pronouns are not really a thing in Japanese. They repeat people’s names, even when they speak of themselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronouns_in_Japanese
ndupont ha kaban wo totta
ndupont took bag [kaban = bag, totta = took]
Whose bag did ndupont take? Presumably their own but that’s an additional mental step that Japanese native speakers do which isn’t necessary when you have a pronoun in there indicating ownership. And even Japanese can do that in order to prevent this kind of ambiguity:
ndupont ha kare/kanojo no kaban wo totta.
ndupont took his/her bag.
Which of course still only tells you if ndupont took someone else’s bag if the pronoun isn’t ndupont’s but it works in most cases.
To further decrease ambiguity you could do this:
ndupont ha jibun no kaban wo totta
ndupont took (his/her/their) own bag
So just because you can get through the day without pronouns most of the time and many languages do just that,
they dodoesn’t mean they don’t serve a purpose. Thank you for coming to my ted talk.Edit: forgot how I began that sentence halfway through.
Thanks, I enjoyed your Ted talk!
That’s a cool fact! My GF is learning Japanese but I didn’t think of asking her on the topic, now I know I should!
Mostly the same as it is now: Based on whether you’re talking 1st, 2nd or 3rd person, as well as singular or plural. There would just be a single third-person pronoun instead of multiple.
