Ask Lemmy

Wouldn't it be so much less complicated if we just exclusively used gender neutral pronouns?

I'm pretty sure Tagalog doesn't have gendered pronouns.

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.

Hair.

In English, They/Them, unless they prefer otherwise

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.

status, like they already are in many languages

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.

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.

“If my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike!”

Distance. You'd have proximate and distal pronouns, like this and that.

Personhood.

CS2 rank

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.

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.

They would all be non-gendered pronouns.

"I", "you", and"we" are singular pronouns with no gender specification. They/Them, while ~~technically~~ commonly taught as plural, ~~has taken on the role of~~ is 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.

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.

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

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

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."

I don't understand why this post has so many downvotes, this discussion has been fascinating!

I'd imagine the same as ours: broadly speaking, random shit that just happened to show up one day. They'd just need fewer of them than we happen to use in English.

Pronouns as a word category aren't as inherently linked to gender as you'd think, just commonly influenced by it. You're presumably asking from an English viewpoint, where we happen to split some third person pronouns by gender. Finnish, for example, already doesn't do that, their only equivalent of he/she/they is hän which, like "they", goes for anything. Japanese has absolute shit tons of pronouns of all kinds, some of which are very gender linked and some of which are fairly equal opportunity.

The connection between gender gender and grammatical "gender" is kind of overrated anyway, speaking as a native of a language with gendered nouns. The name is misleading: people obviously have genders, but when generalized to all nouns it gets... arbitrary as hell. Practically it's just an extra bit of information you need to memorize for each one. What would it even mean for a book to have a gender, and why is it what it is? (The answer is unfortunately "fuck you, that's why" because natural languages aren't required to make any logical sense)

On the upside, if you're German you can make your news headlines real short and awkward to read. It's like code golf, or something.

Well there are several possibilities. For instance, pronouns could be based on simple clicking sounds that indicate one's social proximity to the queen.

Probably active/passive actor or more short forms of names. I.e. everyone must have a single syllable descriptor. There are various extant examples of grammar that is more complex than just gender. English does have very few complexities after all.

Basically anything with a roughly 50 50 split in usage in spoken language