- 1 month
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.
- 1 month
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?
- 1 month
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.
- hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish1 month
You can just as easily do without any gendered pronouns, like some languages do already
- 1 month
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)
- 1 month
It doesn’t even need a hypothetical society. In my language there is one word for he/she(/it). It’s genderless. The rest is the same: genderless. Almost everything is pretty much the same as in English - it gets tricky when translating he/she type disambiguity situations in books and films, though.
You just get the gender from context, when it’s needed. You’d be surprised to see how often it’s not.
1 monthDistance. You’d have proximate and distal pronouns, like this and that.
- 1 month
What languages base their pronouns on status? I’d like to read about them.
- Klear@piefed.worldEnglish1 month
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
- 1 month
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.
- 1 month
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.
- 1 month
Excuse me, is this sir’s suitcase? Can I help sir with this?
Replace with ma’am, master, etc
In many languages the plural form is used similarly. In my native danish it’s “De” vs “du” (De is always written with a capital letter)
- 1 month
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.
- 1 month
Banks was ahead of his time in so many ways. What an absolutely brilliant writer.
- 1 month
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.
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.
- 1 month
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.
- 1 month
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).
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.
- 1 month
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.
You can see something like this in German sometimes. We usually don’t publish full names for criminals or victims of crimes, you often only get the first name plus first letter of the last name like Zaphod B., in the following text the person is then referred to as B.
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.- psud@aussie.zoneEnglish1 month
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.
- givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish1 month
is being used more often
Depends on timeline really, but short answer is you’re still wrong.
Shakespeare era literature defaulted to the singular they, he/she was only used in specific and rare situations.
So compared to 40 years ago, the singular they is having a resurgence. Compared to 400 years ago and it’s barely being used today.
What should make it obvious that English is becoming more gendered and not less, is other western European languages even have gendered nouns. Put a Spaniard, a German, and a Frenchman in a room with a table and they’re just gonna argue what kind of genitals the table would have if it was a hypothetical living thing.
That also helps illustrate how a language can just drop gender, English just uses “the” while other languages use something like “die, der, das” all to mean the same as “the”.
- 1 month
Wouldn’t it be so much less complicated if we just exclusively used gender neutral pronouns?
- 1 month
An individual would be referred to by their name. A group would be they/them.
- 1 month
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.
- aldhissla@piefed.worldEnglish1 month
This question has a false premise and thus makes no sense.
Many natural languages are already genderless, so your question is equivalent to: “In genderless and sexless languages, what are pronouns based on?”, implying that there has to be some sort of gender-based polymorphism among pronouns.
