“If my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike!”
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
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I would assume it would be something like your physical characteristics, like if you had long hair, or were a very tall person, or very short, or the color of your skin or something, but not as a pejorative, but instead simply as a way of identifying someone based on a known characteristic.
Yep, something that’s easy to remember and that immediately catches your eyes.
An individual would be referred to by their name. A group would be they/them.
They/them, I guess
Pronouns would be based on they/them? ;)
The depth and darkness of your holes.
In English, They/Them, unless they prefer otherwise
Wouldn’t it be so much less complicated if we just exclusively used gender neutral pronouns?
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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.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”.
