An individual would be referred to by their name. A group would be they/them.
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.
I’m pretty sure Tagalog doesn’t have gendered pronouns.
Wouldn’t it be so much less complicated if we just exclusively used gender neutral pronouns?
Hair.
Distance. You’d have proximate and distal pronouns, like this and that.
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.
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”.
In English, They/Them, unless they prefer otherwise
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.”
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
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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)
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.
You can just as easily do without any gendered pronouns, like some languages do already
status, like they already are in many languages
What languages base their pronouns on status? I’d like to read about them.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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).
“If my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike!”
