Follow

It occurred to me that one solution to the English pronoun problem is to simply drop them for third person singular. That is the only time pronouns are gendered, but it's also the only verb form that conjugates for most verbs. Time will tell whether "they" will be become both singular and plural (as happened with "you"), or whether the pronouns start being dropped, as often happens in informal writing: "Pat is a coworker. Eats lunch at noon every day. Goes home at five. Never varies the routine"

Reminds me of when my mom was on a committee to choose a textbook for Sunday school classes, and the priest nixed their choice because it used the word "God" too much .. by which he meant that it was pretty obviously trying not to use a gendered pronoun for God. But it sounded pretty funny the way he phrased it.

@AlphaCentauri

Obviously, whatever you do, someone's going to be unhappy. I don't care if I'm gendered, misgendered, or ungendered, but to some getting the gender right is very important, and taking away gendered pronouns makes it harder, not easier, to declare a gender.

Few languages have them, but what we could use are gendered *1st person singular* pronouns, so people could easily declare their gender just by saying something about themselves, without having to say "my pronouns are ___."

Sign in to participate in the conversation

CounterSocial is the first Social Network Platform to take a zero-tolerance stance to hostile nations, bot accounts and trolls who are weaponizing OUR social media platforms and freedoms to engage in influence operations against us. And we're here to counter it.