language invention, pronouns
all of my invented languages don't make gender distinctions in pronouns (there's no he/she/they/it, just they/it or some other system)
this is because:
* the majority of languages on earth DON'T distinguish between genders
* gender neutral always is easier for literally everyone
language invention, pronouns
@DialMforMara so dapiica has a proximate/obviate distinction!
I haven't decided what I'm doing for dwi~
(~ is a letter in the dwi~ writing system)
language invention, pronouns
@DialMforMara (I have other languages, but they're nowhere near ready for anything)
language invention, pronouns
@lizardsquid ooh, obviate. I like fourth person.
What sound does ~ represent?
language invention, pronouns
@DialMforMara ~ is the voiceless retroflex sibilant /ʂ/
language invention, pronouns
@lizardsquid *tries to produce the sound, ends up sounding like an angry cat*
language invention, pronouns
@DialMforMara omg
language invention, pronouns
@lizardsquid My understanding is that the main use of pronouns is as kind of a variable-replacement disambiguator, so you don't have to keep saying <name> over and over again -- but at least one artificial language I've heard of (I think it was Lojban, but I might be misremembering) makes them sequence references rather than gender references.
...so there are pronouns for "the 1st person mentioned", "the 2nd person mentioned" and so on.
Eng equiv, maybe: 1e, 2e...?
language invention, pronouns
@woozle there's also proximate/obviate pronouns, where one person in the story is marked as the most important, and then you use the "most important" pronoun for them and the "less important" pronoun for the other people in the story
language invention, pronouns
So... opening this up as a serious question, would it work if we tried this in casual conversation on Masto?
Like, you could say "LizardSquid was talking about pronouns, and 1'e was kind of annoyed about gender, and Woozle has an idea. What do you think of 2'es idea in response to that?" (Arbitrary apostrophes are just there to signal this particular usage.)
language invention, pronouns
@woozle we could try it - but we'd be making a dialect of english with completely different pronoun rules, so it would be hard to understand for outsiders!
language invention, pronouns
@lizardsquid Oooh, that would be just *terrible.*
Also, I'm sure nobody could figure it out from context, because learning words from context is haaaaard.
;-)
language invention, pronouns
@woozle well, learning words from closed classes (pronouns, prepositions, determiners, all kinds of grammatical words) is actually really hard!
language invention, pronouns
@lizardsquid I can't imagine being fazed by it, but then I have a weird brain.
language invention, pronouns
@woozle I'm gonna ern my friend's place var nit wen cuddle
language invention, pronouns
@lizardsquid Yeah, but them's not numeric. Less cues.
Use those same words in several more sentences, though, and I bet I could get at least a general sense of what they mean.
language invention, pronouns
@woozle @lizardsquid The thing you're talking about already exists in natural languages~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obviative
language invention, pronouns
@lizardsquid do your conlangs include quick ways of distinguishing between different third-person referents?